Let the Galaxy Forget Your Name
by icameherejusttosaythis
Summary: Sequel to "Little Wing" and "Return to the Walled Garden." Liara T'Soni has been in hiding for ten years, but circumstances beyond her control have forced her out into the open again. Will she survive long enough to find out what her mother was investigating?
1. Chapter 1: Prologue

Prologue

 _24 August, 2401_

The pretty quarian folds her hands in her lap, while the interviewer gives her a moment to compose herself. Behind the interviewer, a turian, about forty, with dark facial markings and leathery gray skin, two panels of lights and a recording drone. Behind that, a female turian, and a male, named Varian, standing by the window, where the waning crescent of Menae cast a dim blue glow over the trees and hills lopes beyond.

"I understand this is hard," the interviewer says. His name is Recto. Now he leans in. The Quarian folds her hands again, and looks up at him. There, in the camera light, you can read a feeling. Anguish, resignation, anger, maybe. She's young and old all at once. Life has asked too much of her, and likely that won't stop. Ever.

She gives a nod, and Recto asks, "Can you tell me what happened to you on Lorek?"

"We were sent there," the quarian says. "Only the message we got didn't call it Lorek. They called it Esan."

#

Pictures of ruins. Of a camera drifting across a city called Daybreak, first seen from orbit, then the upper atmosphere, and stitched together finally with footage shot by a drone at low altitude. In the lens: ruins. Crashed ships. Circular avenues imposed over a square grid, an urban plan commonly known as _asari colonial_. Then, up close, shots from the street of reaper husks and cannibals, the flesh stripped away, and only the mechanical parts remaining.

 _Esan,_ the narrator says. _The old asari name, before the batarians gave it a new one. Before the reapers came, we knew it as Lorek. Now, no one mentions it at all. The batarians are gone, the asari are gone. In 2186, the reapers left no one on the surface alive. Anyone who survived, escaped—if you can call it that—to Omega_.

#

"Why were you there?" the interviewer asks.

"We were looking for an object," she says. Her hands twist in her lap. Her geth show the image on screen, the characters 303. "This was supposed to mark the spot. Someone had left something there, and we were to retrieve it."

"And what was this object?"

"Our captain never told us."

"Your captain—Shen vas Vesta, correct?"

"That's right," the quarian says. "We didn't usually do surface work. Our ship was better suited to orbital and deep system work, not scavenging for things on the ground."

"And so what happened when you landed?"

#

More pictures of ruins, buildings burst open, furrows in the ground, filled with solidified nazarite. Wasteground. Old vehicles rusted and burned so that little but a vague shape remains. Then: newer vehicles, shot up, weathered, but clearly newer arrivals. All around the vehicles, dark stains on the ground, where bodies had lain, then been moved. A shot of an old structure: a mound of prefabricated housing units, covered in dirt and then in vegetation. More dark stains. An entryway partially destroyed by a blast.

The interviewer and the pretty quarian are there now. Now you can see how the look in her eyes has worked on the rest of her body. She's leaning on a cane like an old woman, though she isn't old. There she is in the blasted-out hole of the entryway, standing on a heap of rubble and gesturing.

"This is where it happened," she said. "We were inside, looking for the marker. I was in one of the central galleries off the main corridor. There were about twenty of us searching the lower level."

"Were you armed?"

"We had a few pistols," the quarian says. "Some explosives." A shudder runs through her and she looks again at the doorway.

"One of your crewmates was found with a rifle. Up on the top level."

"I don't know anything about that," the quarian says. "Anyhow, the only other weapons we had were blasting charges."

"Why explosives?" the interviewer asks.

"We'd been asked to destroy the location where we found the object."

Now they're climbing onto the upper level, looking out over the perpetual night to the east, the perpetual daylight to the west. They stand in a twilight, while the wind blows dust from the rubble between them and the camera.

"You were wounded," the interviewer says.

"I ran. One of the attackers shot me. I kept running and somehow I got away."

"Somehow?"

The quarian shakes her head. "I still don't understand. Someone else was here. Not with us, but looking for the same thing. She and her crew saved my life."

#

 _Ashana nar Vesta_ , _EVA operator, had served two years on the_ Vesta _, a deep system salvage tug, first near Palaven, then later in the area surrounding Omega. Her name is listed on the "lost with all hands" declaration issued by the joint investigation launched by the Citadel and the quarian government._

 _Records of her arrival on the Citadel are spotty at best. Her admission to Huerta Memorial is logged, but subsequently scrubbed from any other databases. Nonetheless, her DNA matches the numbered samples remaining from the lab-grown organs fashioned for her at the hospital's trauma and recovery center. When asked for comment, neither Council, nor the quarian legation had any comment._

 _But let us be clear. Ashana nar Vesta was supposed to have died that day._

"Can you tell the galaxy," the interviewer asks, "what you have to say?"

"I'm alive," the quarian says. "My name is Ashana nar Vesta, and I am still alive."


	2. Chapter 2: Maroon

Maroon

 _3497, asari common calendar (Approximately three thousand years ago)_

Essa was squatting by a forest trail, her eyes fixed on a gap between two bushes that in the waning daylight looked like the mouth of a small cave. In one hand, she clutched a spear, in the other, the handset of her radio. Nothing stirred. Essa held still, waiting, denying herself the pleasure of picking away the scabs of mud on her face.

The creature she was waiting for wouldn't come. This was an old trail, she knew, and the animals she was hunting were most active at dawn, and when the planet's largest was particularly bright during this part of the month. Still, a commander led by example, and here she had to let everyone know she was not above doing her part to keep the crew fed. Another hour, she told herself, and she could return to camp. Before it was full night, and it began to get cold.

She squinted, and then dozed perhaps. Half an hour went by, and the sun, traveling fast overhead, was less than a fist over the treetops.

There was a rustle in the brush, and before Essa could ready her spear, the creature she'd been waiting for, an animal covered in defensive scales, and with broad forepaws meant for digging burst through the break and with a grunt of surprise, then terror, tore past her down the path.

Without thinking, Essa leapt to her feet, and gave chase. She keyed her handset twice, signal for _game afoot,_ hoping someone nearby might be in a better position to strike a blow, but the forest was quiet, but for her footfalls, and the creature, and the beating of her heart.

Just like that it was gone, into a burrow in the roots of a nearby tree, into the undergrowth, under the leaves. She couldn't tell. Essa stopped, held her breath, and listened for the sound that wasn't the wind in the branches, or the blood pumping in her ears, or the water in the streambed, half a kilometer away.

There it was, a low growl of breath, it was close by, winded from the sprint. She swiveled her head to look as far behind her as she could, but there was nothing. The forest floor was damp, and smelled of sweet rot, like a forest should, the air cooler than out in the daylight, a thin fog of mist and dust, making leaning shafts of light. No signs of a burrow, no tracks, none that she could see anyhow. There was a rise in the ground, the rise itself apparently the result of a massive root system belonging to one of the thick-trunked trees.

There was a sudden squeal of surprise, and then a yowl. Essa scrambled over the rise , and then stepped around the tree, where she found herself standing face to face with an altogether different sort of animal.

There was Liss, holding the creature impaled on the point of her spear, its legs still jerking in death, as she set it down, and with a sharp, flinty rock, began to cut at its skin.

"You flushed it for me," she said, not looking up, and also not addressing Essa by her proper title of Captain. They were ashore, perhaps she wasn't captain any longer.

#

Back to camp, now, where their makeshift shelters were taking on an ever more permanent and homelike feel. The footpaths that ran between them and that were once scarcely visible, were now worn and hard packed by thousands of individual footfalls. It would rain soon, the way it seemed to nearly every evening on this continent, of this planet, named after one of Athame's earliest bondmates, Ferisan. The one that didn't work out. The one that turned on her.

Ferisan was a low-gravity world, two thirds as massive as Thessia, but with a hot core that spun fast, and produced massive magnetic fields that created amazing green and red auroras every night. The atmosphere was thinner than Thessia, perhaps cooler, but only at night, and the low gravity made for odd geoforms: steep hillslopes and gullies that filled with roaring water in a downpour; for strange plants, too: trees that stretched their branches nearly a hundred meters into the sky, for creatures with fragile bones, and soft muscles, that in a few cases made for good eating.

It was beautiful in its way, Essa thought, though sometimes she had to force herself to stop and look. She stopped now, slowing her pace, as she passed through the knot of shelters that bounded both sides of the main path.

Evening was coming on. It always arrived as a surprise, the day seeming barely to have started, given that Ferisan's day-night cycle was just short of fourteen hours. Mostly the crew was awake for a full rotation, then slept during the second "night," only to start over again, with the coming dawn. At the communal fire, pots boiled over bundles of dried rushes. Members of the crew were piling more rushes to the side of the fire, where they would dry well enough to serve as fuel the following morning.

Liss bounded on ahead. Already she and two others were dressing the scaly creature to add to whatever was already cooking. Orie sang. Someone else joined in. As the sun fell toward the horizon, Essa felt a sense of calm come over her.

Everything seemed in order, except that nothing about this was right. Two years ago, these women had been among the most highly trained scientists of their generation. Or the most highly specialized killers. Now here they were, hunting and gathering, like the asari had done fifty thousand years ago, when Athame was said to have walked among them.

Twenty-five souls, Essa thought, as she surveyed the campsite. Off in the distance, the launch sat in the open, under the now darkened sky. The stars were out. The same ones, she realized that flickered over Thessia, and yet their arrangement and order not the same. Low on the horizon, a blue orange dot wobbled in the last of the day's heat, a gas giant they'd named Puria, after Essa's home district.

#

They had planned on staying for a month, to refuel, and to gather food. That had been two years ago. Now they were scraping an existence out of the landscape, hunting what meat they could, picking tubers and nuts and berries. Their first winter planetside, they might as well have stripped the forest bare. _Now we know hunger_ , Liss had told her, _The way the mothers did, before Athame taught us to make records of our history._ Liss had been a commando once, was one still, and was putting her dangerous skills to good use as a hunter. As were the others.

The scientists, meanwhile, left off their gathering every few rotations to study the local flora and fauna. What they were finding was more than a bit troubling to Essa, though she said nothing about it, except they should go on with their mission, which, after all, was research.

The _mission_. They'd been sent to recover an FTL probe, and so they'd been waiting, in the orbit of Parnitha's outermost gas giant, waiting for it to return, where they would use the planet's gravity to decelerate the probe enough that they could grapple it and pull it on board.

But that had been before they found _it_. The installation, an automated space station, big as an asteroid, and built by only the goddess knew.

Their _mission_ , she thought again, as she approached the firepit. She and the crew had departed High Rock with sixty days of food, additional fuel cells, and extra supplies, all meant for an expedition that was intended to last for forty days at most. That mission, it may as well have been in a past life, or a dream. Two years—well, now it was approaching three—it wasn't just the time they'd been gone, but the distance they had traveled.

Everything after that, the commandos attempting mutiny, the death of the _Nixia_ 's original captain, the interaction with the installation that had flung them thousands of light years across the galaxy, half a dozen more jumps, using similar installations, each one taking them farther and farther from Thessia, until it looked as though their ship was set to make a full circle around the galactic core, before wheeling back around for a return to Parnitha. After their second jump, one of the navigators had killed herself with a long sharp piece of metal. After their fifth relay jump, one of the engineers had disappeared out the airlock. After their seventh, Essa had found Orie in the airlock, inner door sealed and the outer armed and ready to open.

The system they had entered contained a habitable-looking planet, and so they had decided to park the ship in orbit, and set down planetside to search for food, water, fuel.

They'd found the Farisan climate reasonably suitable, with a variety of edible plants, and a even few animals. The area surrounding their first campsite seemed reasonably secure. They'd never meant to put down roots, but they'd hit a run of bad luck. Their launch had never been intended for quick transatmospheric turnaround, and the strain on the little ship's reactor and engines required a week's worth of maintenance, every three or four trips from the _Nixia_ to the ground. Even this wouldn't have held them up for very long, if it hadn't been for a micrometeoroid strike on one of the _Nixia'_ s solar arrays that had blown a fist-sized hole in the main power conduit, exactly the wrong place for such a thing to happen. Fortunately the ship's acting XO had been able to steer the ship out of further trouble, but parking the _Nixia_ in an even higher orbit meant greater strain on the launch's thrusters, with few spare parts to help make up the difference.

After a lengthy stretch of repairs, Essa and the acting XO had decided to split up the crew, to send the _Nixia_ back to the installation, where the navigator could study any data she could get from installation's chart room. From there, with other data they had already collected, they might be able to predict or even control their destination before executing their jump.

It seemed like the most desperate of measures, but Commandant Razia, leader of the commandos, had suggested it might possible, and Nerai agreed. Each of them had access to knowledge that Essa couldn't even begin to guess at.

All right. They'd gone through with the plan. It was that or face losing everyone, either to starvation, or illness; or perhaps a lifetime from now another expedition, or another sufficiently advanced civilization would find their withered bones, and the remnants of their camp, buried under several millennia of dust.

She'd promised Orie they would never stop looking for a way home. But in the meantime, they would settle here for as long as they needed to. They would get by, while they figured out how to make the installations fling them homeward, instead of on a circular course around the galactic core. They would _survive_.

Essa stood by the fire, letting it warm her face and hands. Two of the other hunting parties had taken animals. Buoyed with the knowledge that she might eat that evening after all, Essa headed up the path in the direction of the launch. Neela was waiting for her by the landing gear, and she seemed in a good mood, given the circumstances. Perhaps she'd smelled the cooking meat, too.

"We've found four more specimens," she said. "Not the same ones, but separate individual species." Essa nodded for her to continue. "Three kinds of microbe and another plant."

It didn't make any sense, and yet here it was. They had positively matched nearly three-dozen species, mostly microbial, but also seven plants and one animal, that were identical, or evolutionary relatives of species found on Thessia. Years ago, when they had boarded the installation orbiting beyond Tevura, they had found a garden filled with plants that grew on the asari homeworld. Since then, on one other planet, they had found a bush that bore a long-lasting fruit that they had collected in bushels and that had sustained them for two more months of spaceflight, also native to Thessia.

Someone had been seeding these plants throughout the galaxy. They were all a little different. The trees that grew on Thessia—some of them had since gone extinct. On Farisen, they had adapted to the low gravity and the somewhat dimmer light of the parent star. They grew to well over a hundred meters here, in thick forests that allowed individual trees to prop their branches against another, to avoid from falling in high winds.

Elsewhere, the crew had found the same bushes that grew the same berries they'd encountered earlier. Here they were bigger, the size of a fist, and their flesh denser, it had to be cut and cooked before it could be eaten, but otherwise it was the same plant. And growing along with the fruit-bearing bushes they a kind of ground cover native to the coastal regions on Thessia that bound nitrogen in the soil. The smaller plants were sustaining the bushes, as though they'd been planted together, eons ago, one put in place to feed the other.

"What," Neela had asked Essa one evening, when camp was quiet, and they were alone, "—what if these plants are native, not to Thessia, but _to here_ , or some other planet we've yet to find?"

"What are you saying?"

Neela was quiet for a long time. "I'm saying a lot of things. All of them are pretty terrible to have to confront." She spread out her hands and lay them flat on the grass matting that made up the floor of their tent. "These plants didn't travel on their own, right?"

"I'm with you so far."

"So someone brought them. Planted them. Tended them, even." Neela worked her thumb against the tips of her other fingers, a sure sign that she was trying to slow down so she would explain properly. "Those ruins we found on Denni. You said they'd been built as a hiding place, a kind of bunker." She paused again. Her thumb moved from the index to the middle finger. "But they had built the bunker _under_ another set of ruins, older ones. Who were they? Some day we may find out, but what if it was them? What if they came to Thessia when we were still—" Neela stopped and looked around, gesturing vaguely at the camp surrounding them, "—when we were living like this? Think about the old stories—about Janiri, who brought us seeds and taught us to settle and farm. Lucen who gave us pottery, and our biotic abilities, and finally Athame herself, who taught us numbers. What if it wasn't just a _story_?"

Essa shook her head. "But that's all it is. A story." Wasn't it?

#

Neela was small for an asari, half a head shorter than most of the crew. When she wanted to—and she often did— she could just rest her chin on Essa's shoulder. Circumstances of life aboard the _Nixia_ had flung them together, and now they were as close to bondmates as anyone could get without a proper ceremony.

She gave Essa a boost onto the ladder and then the dreamlike look in her eye went away, and she seemed to return from a long way off.

"We'll need to test the samples," she said, "In the lab, I mean."

Essa nodded. She knew what that meant. _Back onboard the ship_. It implied the question of when the _Nixia_ would return.

When the _Nixia_ got underway, carrying a skeleton crew, the XO, the chief navigator, and two commandos and one engineer, it had been planned that they would be gone for about six weeks: two weeks outbound, a week to examine its data, and a two week trip inbound. They had enough food to last nearly twice that long, and it was turning out they'd need it because they had been gone for nearly two months. While simultaneous communication from the edge of the solar system was impractical, they maintained daily burst transmissions.

The trip out had gone well. They had succeeded in boarding the installation and they had managed to get some good data from the chartroom. A few days later they reported having found machines that dispensed some kind of food. They were busy collecting and storing it for the return trip, just in case.

Their next message stated that they were preparing for departure. Then two days of silence. Then another message stating they'd had trouble with the ship's drive system. They would find a workaround solution and begin their burn on their next rotation.

Then a cryptic message: _New discovery aboard installation. Investigating._

Then silence, three solid days of no contact, aside from the steady ping of the ship's transponder.

Neela didn't know. Razia didn't know. Essa had vowed to tell no one about it. Not until she'd figured it out on her own.

#

In the cockpit, she flipped the comms panel from standby to active, and as the equipment began humming and waking up, she waited for the brief, shrill tone that would indicate that the system had received a new transmission. When all the panels were green, there was nothing—nothing aside from the _Nixia's_ transponder tone that told Essa very little. Except that the ship had, as of nine hours earlier, still been in the system. She examined the telemetry data and tried to see if she could get a fix on the ship's exact position. The engines were working, the ship still had fuel and air pressure, and it had electrical power. While she waited for the data to compile, she uploaded the message she'd coded that morning, as she had the mornings before.

 _***Planetside Actual: situation unchanged [STOP] Crew and camp in good order [STOP] Advise immediately on status and position [STOP] Can't keep your silence quiet forever [OUT]***_

 _Can't keep your silence quiet forever_. She'd added that line since yesterday. Truth was, she could phrase it however she wanted; there was nothing she could do. The ship would respond, or it wouldn't. It would return, or it wouldn't. They would be stranded forever, or they wouldn't.

Essa looked over the panel again, thinking she'd seen something on the display. She stared, thought there was nothing, and then looked away. But then there it was at the edge of her vision. One of the bands, not their usual channel, was spiking. She turned the dial and put the headset back on.

For a moment it seemed the channel was empty, with nothing but background radiation ticking off their antennae. But then there it was, a low growl, irregular, but with a pattern to it, like an engine running at idle, or the sound a factory might make, singing itself to sleep. Essa ran the sound through their filters to see if there was any discernable meaning to the noise, and finding nothing, noted its angle, then made a recording, transferred it to a storage device, and put the device in her pocket. The computers had finished their computations in finding the _Nixia_ 's transponder beacon and calculated a rough position, which had only changed relative to theirs in ways consistent with an orbiting object. Certainly there was no sign they'd started burning starward, as she had hoped they would. Essa stepped down through the main hatch, descended the ladder, and stepped onto the hard-packed dirt.

Neela was waiting under the ladder. "What is it?" she asked.

"They need another day," Essa said.

#

Back during her first few tours in the science corps, Essa had never had trouble feeling a sense of wonder. Space travel is full of boredom and terror, but in between the body-crushing stresses a burn, and the giddy weightlessness of the drift, she could have spent hours watching storms bloom in Thessia's tropics, or following the irregular roll of an asteroid pacing alongside her ship, or watching Parnitha rise above the cloudtops of Janiri. Space had always filled Essa with a sense of real awe, one that sometimes made her not only believe that Athame had once walked among them, but that she had meant for the asari to rise up and step off their homeworld, if for no other reason to _behold_ the universe she had made.

Planetside, though, Essa sometimes forgot to look at anything at wasn't directly in front of her. It was too easy to see only the jumble of tents, or feel the smoke from the common fire pit sting her eyes, or smell the reek of the latrine pits that should have been dug farther from camp. The nights were filled with coughing, or sometimes the joyful gasps from this or that crewmate bonding with another. Several on the science team had fallen madly in love with counterparts on the commando squad. Liss and Meria were practically bonded. Even Orie, young little mouse that she was, was always in Nerai's tent, seeing to her every need.

And Nerai needed. A year earlier, she'd given birth to a healthy child that she held at her breast, even as she slept. Orie watched over them both, pleading concern for the _little one_ , Norinna.

Returning to camp, Essa found the three of them sitting on the floor of their tent, on a scrap of what had once been tarpaulin, the two adults weaving a grass mat, while Norinna rolled a ball woven from rushes across the ground to her mother.

Essa sat with them, sitting quietly on the ground, while the family played and worked in companionable silence. She should tell them, Essa thought, that the _Nixia_ had dropped out of contact, and that there was nothing that they could do, that they were all going to be stranded here, for the rest of their lives, and that she, their captain had failed them, and that she was sorry.

Norinna pushed the ball across the floor at her, and Essa, taking it in her hand, nearly burst into tears, but then Neela appeared in the opening to the tent, looking pale. Behind her there was a swell of noise. A terrible shriek, like an instrument out of tune, and then a scream. Then a dozen voices shouting all at once.

It wasn't until she had stepped into the light that Essa realized Neela was hurt. Her hand was covering a gash on her shoulder, a slick of blood that went down to her wais, and stuck into the flesh between the folds of flesh and the cloth of her uniform was an object that might have been a claw or tooth.

"Something just took Aneris," she said. "Get the weapons." And then she collapsed to the floor.


	3. Chapter 3: All Blue is Blue

_23 October 2401_

The column of vehicles was moving up a muddy dirt track through a forest that had been clearcut in the last decade, and was now beginning to grow up again. Thin-stemmed pines brought in from earth, the kind that grew in any kind of soil. After algae and sawgrass, they were the third stage of terraforming.

Every so often there was a bomb crater, sometimes in the road itself, forcing the convoy to drive around, into the woods, knocking down trees. The mat of pine needles burned in places, but the atmosphere was still thin, and fires generally didn't last long or grow very large. Every now and then the lead vehicle stopped with a jolt that slammed the helmets and shoulders and weapons of their occupants together. The man across from her, a human, not particularly young with dark stubble on his chin, leaned forward to spit on the flatbed between them. He'd been doing it for better than an hour, and the no-slip coating looked slick and greasy.

Across from her, beside her, up and down both rows, a squad of soldiers, most of them humans, most of them male, all of them wearing the same mobile armor that would stop a fast moving projectile, or shrapnel, all powder coated in the black-on-gray pattern worn by Kano Security.

Ten vehicles in the column. So many more efficient ways to move around a planet, but this was the cheapest, and Kano was an outfit with its eyes on maximizing its take.

The truck had stopped again.

"Dead on the road," their gunner whispered. His turret swiveled, and he stared down the sights for a good long while, before he relaxed. The vehicles sat quiet, their fuel cells letting out a nearly imperceptible hum. In the distance, they heard the roar of a gunship holding station near the front line. Chatter said to watch the trees to the northeast, where the enemy had broken through the encircleent and was retreating en masse, in poor order through the woods. Desperate troops looking for safety somewhere, Kessia thought, and understood that they might find it down by the river, five kilometers to the east. A place to regroup and bind their wounds before slipping away our mounting a counterattack.

Broken troops were unpredictable. Desperation did that, made large scale units surrender en masse, or fight to the death. It was always hard to know which one it was going to be, before the shooting started. Best to stay clear of them, if they could. The gunner swiveled again, then relaxed. With a jerk the column began moving again.

#

The asari known to her comrades in arms as Tech Corporal Kessia Thalomis, riding in the fourth vehicle from the front dropped in and out of sleep, in spite of the stim cap she'd crushed between her teeth an hour earlier. Did she know then, that her luck was running out? Or did she see the trap closing around her, and simply not know the way out?

She had been in Echo company for about three years now, never their best operator, but reliable, and only one of two biotics in the entire operation. She kept to herself, but not enough to not fit in. She trained, she assisted, she was a good field medic, and every now and then let slip a little about her life before becoming a mercenary. Usually it came out when a new squadmate saw the scar across her belly for the first time.

"How did you get that?" they would ask.

"During the reaper invasion." The new squaddie would nod, processing, realizing their history books weren't just books.

"But where?" they would ask

And she would answer, "Earth."

That usually ended the conversation. Humans felt a reverence toward the homeworld, even though most she'd met had never set foot there, and likely never would. If they kept pressing, she would say _in London_ , but never add _following Commander Shepard, the best your species had to offer_.

Kessia rarely felt anything but pity for the former Alliance Marines who came out to the traverse to be maimed or wounded or killed for no other reason than the need to make a living. She tried not to listen to their conversations home with their families, asking if they'd received the last payment, or promising to send money that she knew they had already gambled away, or spent in bars or brothels. Kessia tried not to judge, because she sometimes did the same. She was, after all, not made of stone.

#

Kanus Security, optimal outcomes in uncertain times. On any given day they numbered little more than two reinforced battalions. They were good at training local police, or pulling VIP and high value cargo security duty, with the occasional search and rescue or grab operation or hostage exchange, all of which were in high demand across the traverse. She'd put her name on the line, taken her uniform and pay chit, and, so it appeared, had sealed her fate, even then, though she couldn't have known that. Not yet.

And so it went. Horizon. Taetrus. Benning. Security. Picket. Hostage negotiation. In between loads of downtime, soldiers trading stories during idle hours in their bunks, lies, true tales. Hers were all lies, wrapped in the vellum of truth. Kessia was a forged identity, taken from an asari who had died in an accident on a struggling colony world where record keeping was poor. Everyone in her unit thought she'd come from Illium, the lower levels of Nos Astra, and, having come from similar places themselves, understood the impulse to get out.

In any case, most of her comrades had never met an asari who wasn't a mercenary or a dancer or a prostitute, so the story fit, as far as they knew, and Kessia spent most of her time confined on ship, or in barracks, or busy in the field. And with altered fingerprints, retinas, and genetic markers—all thanks to several rounds of illegal stem cell treatments— the alias had, over the years become an identity.

And so it went. Ontarom. Noveria. Ismair Frontier. Security. Ambush and grab. Secure cargo transport.

#

Two months earlier, during transport from Horizon to Ilium, the Central Hierarchy News Agency had broken a story about a young quarian who claimed to have survived a massacre on an abandoned colony planet. Liara's squadmates had gathered around the screen. Humans, she had learned, were suckers for stories about disasters. She listened in but she knew the broad strokes of the story already. The turians had dredged up a figure from Liara T'Soni's past. Given the level of highly sensitive information the news agency had, it was likely they were working in conjunction with the Hierarchy Information Services. The person they'd found was a young quarian named Ashana nar Vesta, last survivor of her crew, killed on Esan, sent to look for something Matriarch Benezia had hidden in the old colony. Kessia remembered having saved her, remembered the quarian's blood on her tunic, as she carried her to the med bay on her ship. The lump of clotted blood that had slid to the floor with a wet slap, like something alife, when she'd taken off her clothes to clean herself.

There she was, still alive, still suffering the effects of her decade old wounds. Kessia, though, couldn't quite fathom why they'd decided to trot her out in front of the galaxy. Even in turian custody, the poor girl would be marked forever. She would never again travel unguarded. And even then, it was likely that Matriarch Deniri could still reach her.

The turians were whipping things up to suggest that there was a vast conspiracy on the part of the asari government and that in particular their chosen delegate to the council, Matriarch Deniri, had, among her many other crimes, paid Aria T'Loak to massacre crew of the _Vesta_ who had landed on Esan, and to kill Liara T'Soni.

There were other claims, too, some backed up by evidence some not, that Deniri had commissioned a Krogan mercenary, who went by the name of Arclight, to release a parasitic symbiote of the leviathan on the human colony Pirin. Arclight had ties to the High Council on Tuchanka, was in fact, married to one of its more important members.

What wasn't clear was why the asari government would want to cause such trouble with its closest allies. Here the report faltered, suggesting simply, that turian naval power was a perceived threat to the asari and human governments, and that each Council race had been wary with one another since the reaper invasion.

Deniri had responded before the broadcast was even over, calling the accusations "inflammatory," thought what they were seeking to inflame, exactly wasn't clear. Except that the turians and the asari and the humans had become locked in an arms race, each seeing who could build more warships per year. The turians were winning that race, but their edge was decreasing steadily as Arcturus station had been rebuilt, and human industrial production had increased. But up until now, the race had seemed to have no point, other than as a means of artificially stimulating each race's respective economies. Gathering weapons only declares intent to use them, the old saying went, and now this little spark had come along.

But there was more to the turian broadcast. After the young quarian had explained herself, the report had shifted to another series of events, namely Liara T'Soni's death on Omega. They produced documentation that two separate organizations had been hired to capture or kill T'Soni on a colony world, Tiptree, that prior to the attack, had served as a refuge of sorts for non-geth AI platforms. Recent exploration of the former colony world showed that the planet's capital had suffered a direct nuclear strike, and had subsequently been stripped of all former signs of habitation. The world was now effectively abandoned, save for small enclaves of homesteaders that were carving a life out of the equatorial forests.

The final section of the report showed several grainy still images of Dr. T'Soni making her way across an open street in the port complex of Omega. This last bit of information aroused particular interest in her barracks room.

What had it all meant? The news had hid Kessia's barracks room with particular force. Tensions between council races meant large-scale instability, and that made for profitable business. Kessia stayed quiet and listened.

"Do you think it's her?" one of her comrades said.

"All blue is blue if you ask me," said another. They leaned in and stared, then half of them jumped on the extranet and began searching for more information.

"It's a good conspiracy," Kessia said. She rolled on her side and tried to sleep, but found she couldn't. Or the next day, or the next. She lost focus on duty and nearly shot a squadmate during a live fire drill. Her sergeant docked her two weeks' pay as a penalty and called it a gift. Most troopers, he said, would have been sent off with their final pay chit and swift kick in the ass. Or spaced.

Kessia thanked him, and got herself under control, using some of her saved up bench time to sit out an op and think things through off base.

#

The still images troubled her. The face troubled her, because, after all it was hers. She had a different face now, rounder, fuller, her eyes narrower, her skin a few shades darker. Still the resemblance was there. She could be a distant relative, one of the T'Soni clan who had grown up downcoast from Armali.

But she wouldn't be identified so easily now. She quite literally was no longer Liara T'Soni. Even the scanners on the Citadel would find that she was a distinct individual, ever square centimeter of her body having been changed. Only a brain or a bone biopsy would show the real her.

During her time away, Kessia studied the images again. The fact that they existed at all was bad enough. It meant two things, the first being that Aria hadn't been careful and had all the data scrubbed from Omega's surveillance network, or that she had saved the images on purpose, for reasons Kessia couldn't explain. Worse, it meant that others might have found news of her escape as well. The turians knew. It was the Hierarchy Intelligence Service that had furnished the images—as the broadcast itself made clear. How long had they been sitting on them? And how had they come into Hierarchy possession anyhow. And whatever else was true, Councilor Deniri, if she hadn't known before, she knew now that Liara was alive, and now she would be looking. Her trail would be hard to follow, but not impossible. Nothing ever was. And Deniri had access to everything, including the Serrice Guards and the whole of the Information Services at her disposal, and their hooks ran far and wide and deep. What did Liara have, aside from an alias and a bad, dangerous job? The Councilor wouldn't even need to acknowledge that Liara had survived her trip to afterlife, but just manufacture an incident to have her killed.

Well, now Deniri had her incident.

#

When Kessia returned to active duty, she immediately boarded a transport with her unit. There were two raw recruits in with the old hands. Replacements for a wounded sniper, and a dead tech specialist. The ship ran dark out of Illium, no communications in or out, and no indication of the assignment until they had entered the Vunia system, where volus—and by extension turian—mining interests had come into conflict with asari claims to land rights on the system's only habitable world.

No one wanted a shooting war between the major powers. If it came to that, it could potentially split the Council apart, leaving Citadel space without an effective government. Clearly someone wanted that as an end result, but that wasn't the aim, at least not yet. And so the turians had been careful in dealing with the conflict, nearly gentle, sending nothing bigger than a frigate, and using mostly contractors to do the fighting, claiming at least that this was a business dispute gone awry.

Canus had signed on with the Hierarchy as low-cost logistics and flank guards for the bulk of the assault force of two reinforced brigades, armor, and their attendant air cover and infantry, hired from the . Kessia had seen them unloading and drilling at the staging area.

They had their objective. Cover the flank of Minos as they advanced toward the capital. Hit a small city along the way. Extract a high-value entity from said city and get them off world without Minos finding out. That last bit was going to be a problem, Kessia was sure.

#

The column of vehicles had stopped again, and the order was going out to ready gear. This was it.

The attack was one of those anticlimactic affairs that starts with a lot of shooting—suppressing fire, breathless scrambling from cover to cover, an airstrike—followed by silence that stretches on into the early afternoon, while you hunt through the rubble looking for signs of an enemy that maybe hadn't ever been there. Kessia's team advanced into their sector, finding nothing but low buildings shattered by rockets and heavy weapons, and perhaps the occasional body. The air smelled like burnt plastic, and high explosive. The underground levels of the buildings were crawling with volus civilians. There was nothing she could do for them, Kessia knew, and moved on, avoiding looking too deeply.

Now and then, small arms fire broke the silence, but it was the exploratory kind, troops advancing under covering fire, or just making sure a burnt-out window frame wasn't hiding a sniper. As the day wore on, even that ended. The enemy, it seemed, really had fallen back to the river. Kessia took no comfort in it.

"A counterattack is coming," she said.

"You always say that."

"I'm usually right," she said. "Be ready."

"Sure thing, boss."

They had set up for the night in a corner room of a third-story building, a pre-cast concrete structure that would provide better blast and bullet shelter than the prefabricated housing down the street. Out below them lay a market square that was empty except for shell holes and a vehicle that had been overturned during the initial bombardment. Beyond the open zone of the square, lay their objective. The other section of the encirclement was meant to push the target out into the open, where their target's security detail could be neutralized and the VIP could be taken into custody. Her platoon had orders to wait until things started moving, likely in the morning.

#

Night came and she didn't sleep. It was easy to stay awake, thinking about Matriarch Deniri, who had done much more than this to try and kill her before, back when her name had been Liara T'Soni.

On the far edge of the square, about four or five hundred meters away, a group of infrared targets had appeared, volus civilians by the look of it, though they were arrayed like they were forming up for an attack. Kessia gave the platoon leader a kick and woke him up. He squinted out through the scope.

"If you're so worried, why don't you hit one of 'em? See what happens."

"Not until we're sure," Kessia said.

"And here I was, thinking you wanted to live long enough to get paid again."

Kessia didn't answer, but shouldered the rifle, took aim, and missed one of the targets by a few millimeters. As it dove for cover a wave of shooting erupted, unfocused, but generally on her position. Some of it came from the rooftops far beyond the square. Whatever else was true, the force in the neighborhood beyond the open ground wouldn't be easily subdued by the second battallion that should have been moving into flanking position.

Kessia shot again, blindly, until the rifle overheated, before retreating toward the back wall, which was now disappearing under a more concentrated barrage. There was a blast, and the wall facing the street shattered and fell into the room. The platoon leader was dead. So was the new tech specialist. Liara rolled down the stairs, clutching her SMG, and struggling to clear the debris from her mouth and eyes.

Rounds struck the building on the second level, coming in at a flatter trajectory. Nearly all of the troops who had been camped here were dead. She grabbed a rifle from the ground and put the facemask on her helmet down. No sense in shooting back. A projectile zipped off her shields. Another rocket hit the building and threw her to the floor, but a hole opened up, and she crawled through it, falling to ground level, and reaching the street just as the house collapsed into a cloud of dust, broken glass and jagged blocks of concrete. Three others had made it out, and they took shelter behind their gun truck, which was shooting, blindly perhaps, at the enemy positions on the far side of the square.

Kessia was dizzy and half deaf from the blast. The rest of the company, arrayed along the edge of the square, was returning fire, though as she watched from underneath the truck, she watched the number of positions that were shooting begin to dwindle. Either the platoons were withdrawing, or they were being picked off one by one.

One of the other soldiers who had taken cover with her had been shot, the bullet coming in through his side, splitting through a seam in his armor, and making a fist-sized exit wound in his chestplate. By the time she got to him, he was dead. The other two were in bad shape, one with a broken leg, the other with a crushed hand and foot.

"We need to get out of here," she said.

They stared at her blankly. A sniper had taken out the gunner on the truck. The one with the crushed hand climbed up and manned the gun, while the other pulled off his helmet.

"We have to move!" she shouted, but he only shook his head. He was bleeding from his ears. Kessia got up and ran, watching her sensors as she went. Behind her the gun truck exploded in a ball of white flame. The comms were roaring with chatter about dropships coming in from the west. The ground moved like a rug being shaken out, and Kessia fell flat on her stomach as the low buildings around her groaned and fell in on themselves. The comms had gone dead. All channels gone, even their transports, still in orbit, were nothing but static. The entire neighborhood was black with dust.

The blast had destroyed the company command post, and most of the neighborhood around it. All of the civilians were buried under the rubble. Who was it? Kessia wondered, that would be willing to spill so much blood, and why? She wondered if the asari and turians had decided to enter a full-on shooting war. With destruction like this, one couldn't be far behind.

She was hurt now, something jagged had pierced her armor and was wedged between her skin and her left side, and it dug a little deeper with every step she took. Her infrared scopes were dead, and so was her motion tracker. She stayed low and moved on, aiming her SMG at the imagined enemies that stood before her.

Two transports roared overhead, braking hard, and stopping to dump their troops not far away. Kessia turned left, her west, and ran hard, ignoring the pain in her side. She found a ditch, and rolled in there, then found that the ditch broke through into the basement of a house, and from there into a tunnel that ran a hundred meters in a fortunate direction. She hurried down it, scanning the channels again.

There was new chatter now, orders going out, reports coming in on how the attack was proceeding. So far the orbital strike and flanking maneuver had been effective. It was possible that the Kessia's entire unit had been wiped out.

So much the better for her, they wouldn't be looking for a wounded straggler, not unless she were really unfortunate.

The tunnel ended. Kessia found a broken flight of stairs and picked her way up to street level. Troops were moving parallel to her position, northward, and just out of sensor range, apparently.

When they had moved away, she hurried to the next open area, where their dropship had landed, its engines at idle thrust. She slipped around toward the ramp, and finding it guarded by a single soldier, pulled him close with her biotics and shot him in the head.

Inside she found the pilots busy, and pulling one out, she trained her weapon on the other. The one she'd pulled, she threw out the back gate and crushed him with her biotics.

To the other, a young female, she said, "What's your unit, human?"

The woman stared at her, her mouth gaping like a fish, but she said, "116th Marines."

"You're Alliance?" Kessia said.

The woman nodded.

"Your ship's unmarked," said. "That's a violation of Citadel code."

"The fuck do you care, mercenary?" the human said, finding some of her ingrained toughness.

"Today I care a great deal. Now tell me why. Your life depends on it."

The woman gaped again, looking like she was about to pass out. "Haven't you heard?"

"Heard what?"

"We're at war."

"War? The Alliance?"

"Everyone," the human said. "Asari, salarians, turians, us."

Kessia lifted her out of her seat, her biotics snapping the straps of her seatbelt, then dropped her down. She fired a round into the chair between the woman's legs. "Next one's in your stomach, human. You're going to fly me out of here."

The human nodded, and then touched the controls.

"You're going to report a mechanical failure and that you need to return to base."

"They'll catch you," the human said.

Kessia risked a glance out through the viewport. "Your friends are dying out there," she said. "A lot more of them will die. In part that's because of me." She pulled off her helmet and threw it to the deck. "My name is Dr. Liara T'Soni. Now fly me to your betters."


	4. Chapter 4: Sword at Night

Liss was first out of camp, following the trail, while behind her calls went out. She had been on watch, and so had been wearing her starlight gear when the call had gone out. Out ahead, in the darkness of the forest, there was something, a gray shape on her scope, something that might have been Aneris, or the thing that had taken her. In her hand, she carried a spear, about as effective a weapon as they could make, given the tools they had. Really it was all anyone would ever need, a long shaft and a sharp point. She could work with that. She knew how to fight, she told herself. She was as dangerous with a knife as she was with a sniper rifle.

Voices gathered in the darkness, noise everywhere. Liss put out the call over the radio to keep silent as best they could. Animals spook. Liss ran again until the lights and the voices faded back into the trees, then stopped to listen.

Whatever had taken Aneris was big. It didn't stop to dodge around the wrist-thick stems of the undergrowth, but simply ran through them, splitting some, tearing others up at the roots. There was blood. Enough that Liss didn't hope to find Aneris alive. Here and there, she found bits of pale feather-like material stuck in crevices in the bark, or caught on splinters. She ran again.

#

Nerai reached her, just as she caught up with the thing. It had stopped in a defile just beyond the stream that passed close by their camp. Liss realized now that they'd been running more or less parallel to it for the past hour. She was tired, but could still keep going, the creature, on the other hand, looked like it was done in by the chase. So much the better. There was no sign of Aneris.

Nerai had stopped about twenty meters away, to her left. The two felt each other at range, Nerai gave two short whistles and they began their attack.

Liss came head on, with a leap across the stream, making no noise, but drawing the creatre's attention. The thing raised what might have been its head to examine her, and got a sharp, probing jab from her spear for it.

The thing reared, standing on its two legs, and a thick tail, braced against the ground. Under its body were two rows of appendages, two grasping arms that ended in claw-hook hands, and a dozen more stumpy claws and arms for clutching that ran in pairs down the creature's chest. These held Aneris. She was most likely dead, or well on her way to being dead. Nerai jabbed again, into the belly this time, enough to draw blood, but not enough for the point to get hung up in the skin or pinched between the creature's bones.

It lunged at her now, its mouth an open circle, a dark ring, ranked with ranks of inward-hooking teeth, not for biting, so much as simply pulling prey inward. Above and below the maw were what might have been eyes. Liss probed for them, while the thing reared back again.

She saw all of this in the time it took for Nerai to fall upon the creature from a rise in the ground on the animal's other flank. Driving hard, she rammed the spear down into a soft part. The animal screeched and lashed out with one of its appendages, dropping Aneris as it did, and wheeling on Nerai, yet somehow still careful not to tread on its prey, but keeping Aneris's body protected between its two thick legs.

Liss saw her moment and dashed forward, grabbing Aneris by the collar of her uniform, dragging her her limp body clear. Lifting with her legs, she hoisted Aneris onto her shoulder and ran, keeping her spear cradled in her other hand. Behind her the predator bellowed, and then there was another sound, a loud roaring, like a river over the falls, and a bony crack. A flash of light, and something shuddered through the air, staggering Liss, so that she nearly dropped Aneris's body.

She turned to see the animal raised up off the ground, its body bent into an odd shape, its legs clutching at the ground but touching only air.

It made a sound, a frail distress call, and a weak intake of breath, then landed with a hard, wet shock at the bottom of the streambed. Silence.

Liss reshouldered her burden and chanced another look behind her. Nerai was standing over the creature, covered in its green-black blood. Whatever she'd done had bent the animal in half, then ripped it open and spilled its entrails. Its powerful legs still jerked and its bird-claw feet twitched in the light—light that came from Nerai's balled fist that she held aloft and then cast down upon what looked to be the animal's head. There was another terrible boom, blinding light, and a blast that shook the ground and showered Liss and her burden with pebbles and fragments of vegetation and drops of the animal's blood.

#

It was going to be a long night. There were more of those things out in the forest. Razia had counted at least three distinct voices, and she and the rest of the commandos on lookout were keeping watch with their infrared gear. There might have been more.

Essa took this information in as she washed Neela's blood from her hands in a basin of water Orie had brought her. They had rushed her out of the tent, once the medical team had arrived. Nothing there for her to do but watch and get in the way.

She looked down at her hands and realized they were shaking. Razia was saying something to her, and she shook her head. "Say again, Commandant."

"I was just saying it's too bad you jettisoned our weapons."

Essa fixed Razia with her gaze until the commando looked away, then said, "Agreed." After a moment she asked, "Have Liss and Nerai reported in?"

Razia shook her head. "Liss called for radio silence." About twenty minutes earlier, a terrible noise and explosion had lit up the forest several kilometers away, so bright it had temporarily overwhelmed Razia's night scope.

A swell of noise passed through the camp, shouting and a roar, then more shouting. Essa rolled through her options. None of them were good.

They could stay and fight, and risk losing more of the crew than just Aneris. Even if they got her back, there was no sense pretending that they could save her with what medical supplies they had on hand. And the same went for Neela. Even aboard the _Nixia_ , a wound like hers would have been—she stopped herself from thinking the word.

They could run. There was a high rock outcrop fifteen kilometers south, not difficult to scale, but the approaches would be difficult for more than one large animal to attack at once. But doings so would leave them exposed to the weather, and to attack throughout the duration of their retreat through heavily forested terrain.

They could burn the forest. It hadn't rained all week. The underbrush was dry. It might work. Or it would only blind them to already nearby creatures.

If things got very dire, their last resort was to retreat to the shuttle with as many of the crew as could reach it, light the engines and hope that the noise and heat scared off the creatures. If necessary they could take off and hover for nearly an hour, fully loaded with all twenty-three of the crew currently on hand. In truth their numbers would be lower. Not everyone would make it. Liss and Nerai were missing. And Aneris, who was surely—Essa stopped herself from thinking the thought to the end.

Essa thought again about Neela and considered going back to the tent to check on her, but stopped herself. They had the perimeter to check.

No matter what they did they were going to lose people, it was only a question of who. But Liss and Nerai were survivors. They would come back.

Essa again shook away the idea, and stepped out of the lab tent, where she had gone to wash up. Together she and Razia jogged the perimeter, checking in with the guard posts who were watching over small groups of two or three members of the science team, who had been tasked with making palings and spears from what wood they could gather without venturing too far into the dark; meanwhile others were digging pits in a zigzag pattern, as instructed by one of the commandos.

Essa examined her watches, the one that kept the mission clock (two years and counting), and the other that kept local time. Three more hours of darkness, about two and a half before twilight. She wondered if Neela would live until dawn. Three paces ahead of her, Razia stopped dead and then crouched, bracing the butt of her spear against the ground, as though she expected an attack. A moment later the brush parted and Neela and Liss emerged, Liss blood-slick and carrying a ragged shape that turned out to be Aneris. Razia and Neela exchanged a nod. Razia turned to Liss and said, "Nerai and I can hold the perimeter for now. Make sure Aneris is tended to."

#

Liss was relieved as she hurried alone through the camp to the medical tent. When she arrived, she was surprised to see Neela sitting up on the mat they'd arranged for her on the floor of the tent. Her clothes were soaked with her own blood, but a line of sutures and a pressure dressing that ran along her collarbone appeared to have stopped the bleeding. Even more surprising was that Aneris was still breathing.

They lay her down and examined her wounds: clawhook punctures, in her chest, and in her back. All of the ribs on her left side were broken; the lung had collapsed; abrasions, bruising, other trauma that would be hard to gauge without proper diagnostic equipment. One of the creature's teeth had broken off inside her body and was caught in the layers of flesh.

Liss hurried back outside to find Razia and the Captain.

#

A little before dawn, Essa returned to the medical tent.

She knelt beside Neela, who closed her eyes against the pain and bit hard on a little rubber cube. The crewmate kneeling on the other side of Neela saw Essa's nod, and got up. Behind them, the rest were still working quietly on Aneris, who gasped in pain, and then went quiet.

"Neela," Essa said. "Can you tell me what happened?"

Neela blinked, and then turned her head. "It was my fault," she said. "I had stopped to ask Aneris a question. She turned away from the woods, and when she did, it came for her. I thought it would take me, too." There was a swell of noise that rose from the edge of camp. Neela bit her rubber block again, and said, "It had me, then let me go." She blinked her eyes and then let her head droop against her chest. "There's still a part of its claw inside me. Can't get it out because it melted into the flesh, they said."

Essa took her hand and gave it a squeeze and they sat in silence for a minute, until Liss came into the tent, looking for someone. Essa went over to her. She and whispered, "Captain." Essa turned and stood. "A word? Outside."

Essa followed her through the flap out into the oncoming light of day. "We found the thing that took Aneris," she said. We killed it. Well, Neela did. I helped."

"That's fortunate," Essa said, but Liss shook her head.

"Nerai," she said. "What she did last night, I've never seen anything like it." Essa started to speak, but Liss stopped her. "I've seen commandos pull a fighter out of cover, or knock a few soldiers back, when they were being swarmed on the battlefield, but nothing like this. She lifted that thing off the ground. Ripped it open. Made it explode from the inside."

Essa shook her head. "You're trained in biotics. You're sure you've never seen anything like it?"

"Not even close. That thing must weigh several tons, at least. She raised it up off the ground and bent it in half. Broke its spine, then hit it again to tear it open."

"What are you saying?"

"That she's dangerous, Liss said. "Maybe not just dangerous. There was something in her eyes last night, more animal than anything else. I don't know if we can trust her."

"Dangerous is a handy skill right now."

"And when we need to put the sword back in the scabbard?" Liss said.

"Let's survive the night," she said, "Before we worry about what our sword might do in the light of day."

The air had gone cold. Essa's eyes had finally adjusted to the near dark, when a patch of light appeared on the ground beside her. One of the medical team stepped out, wiping her hands on a rag. "Captain," she said. Essa turned, and saw the anquish in her face. "Captain," she said again.

"Aneris—" Essa begain.

"No, ma'am," she said. "Neela. The claw that lodged in her wound has triggered some kind of toxic reaction in her body. She had a seizure."

"I don't understand," Essa said.

"She's—. I'm so sorry. She's gone."


	5. Chapter 5: Whitman

Whitman

30 October, 2401

 _Why are you here?_

Liara heard the voice through a fog of drugs. She should have known things were going wrong when the pilot she'd taken hostage requested containment for a reactor breech just before docking. By then she'd lost nearly enough blood to be better than half dead, so perhaps she shouldn't blame herself for the surprise she'd felt, seeing a dozen rifles leveled at her chest in the airlock. Liara had nearly fainted as the rough hands had taken her, strapped her to a board and put a bag over her head. The bag had stayed firmly in place as medics unbuckled her armor and tried to dress her wounds, and transfused her directly from the fabricator that made a decent approximation of asari blood.

The interior of the ship was nearly quiet as being underwater. From somewhere she heard the voices still trying to reach her. There were people in the room. One, no, two.

"Give her another shot," someone said. A hand grabbed her head from behind, and a burning mist sprayed into her left nostril. After a brief respite, the nozzle went into the right side, and the burn repeated there. For a moment the room went all bright colors and the edges of the table seemed impossibly sharp, and then returned to something like normal, except that the body of the woman sitting across the table from her seemed to tremble between where she was and where she would be momentarily. Liara felt dizzy, like she wanted to vomit. She resisted the urge and grasped the edge of the table, realizing just now, for the first time since she'd entered Alliance captivity, that she wasn't shackled.

It had been days, perhaps as much as a week since her she'd arrived here. Now she was in a little room, not quite a cell, so not quite the brig, of a ship called the _Whitman_ , judging by the name stenciled on to an emergency gear locker in the far corner of the room. A bench for a bed, a table, two chairs bolted to the floor. An interrogation room, then. Going by Systems Alliance naming conventions, it was an Assault Carrier, and as the _Whitman_ wasn't on any recent list of available hulls, it meant that this was one of a new class of front-line ships the humans had designed and constructed in what they believed to be near total secrecy. The existence of these vessels, if not their individual names, was widely known, and part of the reason the turians were building dreadnoughts at an alarming rate. It took Liara a moment to realize that she had no one to whom she could report this new intelligence. What good is a spy without a network?

The woman across the table had on a crisp, clean alliance uniform, updated to reflect two hundred years of changing fashion and advances in materials science. It reminded her of Shepard, all those years ago: creases like blades, polished buttons and zips, no wrinkles, not even when seated. The human seated across from her was female, with dark skin, stubble-short hair, yellow eyes. Her left ear was partially fused with the side of her head, the result of a nasty burn that hadn't healed well.

"Dr. T'Soni," the woman said. "My name is Lieutenant Palmyra Vance, Alliance Intelligence Directorate. My associate, Chief Petty Officer Wilkes has just given you a stimulant to bring you out of prolonged anesthesia. The discomfort should go away shortly." There was a cough in the corner of the room, and Liara turned to see a third person, who had perhaps just entered the compartment, or possibly had been standing there forever. "This is Mr. Turner," Vance said. Liara suspected that Turner was not his real name. Dressed in a gray suit and dark tie, hair slicked to the side, he was the sort of man who even in a tiny space, was almost utterly invisible. He smiled at Liara, a surprisingly friendly gesture, from behind thick-rimmed glasses that Liara suspected were augmented to provide live biometric data.

"What do you want with me?" she asked.

Lieutenant Vance looked a little puzzled. "You turned yourself over to us. You may not quite remember the details, but you claimed you were seeking asylum. Of course this was after you'd killed the crew chief and copilot of one of our drop ships."

"They weren't properly secured," Liara said. "I only exploited their weakness."

"Yes, but what was your purpose?"

"You're aware what's happening planetside, aren't you?"

Vance only stared. "It's been a while since I've been boots-down," she said after a long pause. "Tell me."

"I was traveling with a company of mercenaries. They've since been wiped out, by a combination of ground forces and orbital strikes, the latter which, I may add, is in direct contravention of Council law."

"You're aware that, at present, there is no council." This was Mr. Turner speaking. "And, I'm sure you're aware that we're in the Traverse. Citadel law, such as it is, does not apply."

"Your pilot told me about the war. It doesn't make sense. And laws are laws, council or no council."

Vance narrowed her eyes. She projected images of Ashana nar Vesta, taken from the turian broadcast. "I gather you saw this?" Liara agreed that she had. "Then you know what a ton of shit it stirred up."

Vance carefully walked Liara through the information they had. The parasitic outbreak on Pirin, engineered by Deniri and executed by Arclight. Publicly, the Alliance was accusing the leviathan of establishing on a presence beyond the regions afforded to them by the Dekkuna Treaty, which they had signed after the reaper invasion. Spreading leviathan parasites certainly made it look like the leviathan had been there, and Deniri benefitted by creating tension between the Alliance and the leviathan.

Meanwhile, Pirin was uninhabitable, and the Alliance had had no recourse but to destroy all existing infrastructure on the surface in order to guarantee containment. "Deniri's motives are unknown, but they could not go unanswered. The Alliance demanded sanctions and the removal of Deniri. Meanwhile, during the very session when the Alliance ambassador was arguing our case, a group of commandos blew up the fuel depot at Arcturus, which effectively trapped the bulk of the sixth fleet on station until necessary repairs can be completed. The commandos slipped away, but they had help, most likely from the SPECTREs or STG. They used a stealth ship not listed in the asari inventory." Vance showed a picture, little more than a black shape against a field of stars.

"And the turians?"

"Are paying the price for stirring up the shit," Vance said. "At first they claimed neutrality in the matter, but since then, their Second Fleet suffered major losses after an attack by the salarians, who took the main battlegroup by surprise in a hit and run raid through the Jarva relay."

"Have the salarians struck the Alliance, too?"

Turner shook his head. "Their fleet is small, and stretched thin. Sustained warfare is a numbers game, and they know it. Right now our main problem is with the turians."

"The Heirarchy and the Alliance," Vance said, "have always been this close to cutting each others' throats. We've been in an arms race for better than two decades, and they've decided that this is a good opportunity to test our strength and our resolve in defending our colony worlds. They will learn, as they have here on this little bullshit backwater, that we are very determined to hold what is ours, and more than happy to take away what is theirs." Vance gestured at the wall. "You may not have noticed, but an hour ago we began accelerating away. This was a small operation. We're on our way somewhere else."

"You don't mean to hold the territory," Liara said, her voice a whisper. It meant that this was a burn and bounce operation: destroy any orbital infrastructure, blow the spaceports and communications relays, destroy the colony's ability to call for help and at the same time cut it off from its supply lines. The ultimate goal was to create chaos and terror and ultimately instability and unrest on other colony worlds. It was just short of what the reapers had done during the invasion, with planet after planet disappearing from the comms.

Vance shook her head. "It's—unfortunate," she said.

"It's a war crime," Liara said.

"Call it whatever you like, but it's effective strategy." This was from Turner. Liara turned. She could, she realized, crush his chest with her biotics, make all his soft organs pop out through his ribs. But it would be a short-lived satisfaction. She let him grin as he stepped out of his corner.

Turner stepped out of his corner. He was taller than Liara had expected. He put up several images of Matriarch Deniri, some of them quite old. One of them showed the Councilor and Beneizia, both wearing their commando gear, standing in front of a wrecked armored vehicle. Their faces were smeared with soot and grease and maybe blood, and they both smiled the impossibly joyful grins only ever worn by soldiers who have just survived a decisive battle. There were more recent images, too, of Deniri on the Citadel. None of them appeared to show anything untoward. "Deniri and your mother," Turner said. "They knew each other in their commando days. Our sources in your various government agencies tell us that they were quite close at one time. Your mother was her command officer, when they were both attached to Gray Squadron."

Liara knew her mother's military record, of course. Gray Squadron, the Fog of War, as they were sometimes known, were the asari equivalent of the salarians' STG. They'd been around in one form or another since the krogan rebellions, had, in fact, toward the end of the rebellions, nearly been wiped out. They'd been all but disbanded before being reformed with recruits drawn from across the armed forces. It was rumored, though there was no hard evidence of it, that the decimation of Gray Squadron during an operation on Tuchanka had forced the decision to release the Genophage. That was well before Benezia and Deniri's time. The image of the two of them would have been taken on a border world—Mitos Beta, by the look of it—a colony world shared between asari, salarian and krogan interests and hotbed of interspecies fighting. It was located at what was now the intersection of the old krogan DMZ and the salarian and asari bubbles. It had been the site of dozens of proxy conflicts over the centuries.

"You asari take a long view," Turner said. "Deniri has been working on something for a very long time. Centuries perhaps, and it has something to do with your mother."

"You think I know what it is?" Liara asked. "I don't. Even so, Deniri turned my trusted advisors against me, destroyed my network, killed my closest associates, and dozens of innocents, and nearly killed me, all for the sake of keeping it quiet."

"That's the least of it, Doctor," Vance said. "She condemned nearly a million people to die on Pirin, in the worst possible way—"

"I was _there_ , Lieutenant," Liara spat. "You don't need to remind me."

"That she tried to kill you meant that you were onto something," Turner said. "You've been looking for this, haven't you?" He showed her the 303 symbol, the same mark she'd seen on the Citadel, at the Anthill on Lorek—or Esan, as it had been called then, and on Tiptree. "What did you find?"

Liara shook her head. "At one site, old data storage devices, a one-time cipher at another that allowed me to decrypt the drives. There were old images of planets that we couldn't possibly have visited without the mass relays. There was some sort of connection between the images and an old research vessel, listed as lost with all hands, the _Nixia_."

"The 'Little Wing' of the Armali coast," Turner said. "Your mother called you that, didn't she?"

Liara shut her eyes. "Those were the last words she said to me. When I killed her."

"It is our belief that she deliberately scattered these materials, but left a trail that someone could follow, and reassemble."

"Why the secrecy, though?" Liara asked.

"We don't know, but whatever it is, Deniri is involved."

Vance and Turner exchanged a look. Turner sat down on the edge of the table. "Dr. T'Soni," he said, as he sat down on the edge of the table. "May I call you Liara? Okay, good." He spread his hands. "You're not quite—yourself—are you?" He smiled and went on, "You've been through a dozen courses of gene therapy—highly illegal. Your face is different. Your genetic material, some of it anyhow, is different. I'm guessing that's how you disguised who you are when you joined up with your mercenary friends? Yes? Look, it took us a while to figure out that you were, in fact, who you said you were. It involved contacting some people in the know, and it's may be that those contacts have been compromised."

"What do you mean?"

"What I mean to say is that the turians merely _suggested_ that you were alive. But we, somewhat foolishly trusting our sources not to betray our trust, have potentially leaked that information to others, also in your government, and those others happen to be aligned with Matriarch Deniri. We have to assume that the fact that you are not dead, as was widely reported, is known by parties who mean to harm you. In fact, we're quite certain that asari intelligence circles are aware that you are alive."

"Deniri knows that you have me," Liara said. "If she finds out I'm here, she will strike directly at the battlegroup. Now that you're at war, she'll have no reason to be subtle."

"It's very likely that she does," Turner said.

"We've broadcast several false locations and manufactured sightings to mitigate the risk," Vance said. "Your Intelligence Services won't be fooled forever."

Turner got up and looked into the corner of the room, where, Liara suspected, a device was recording their conversation. "We have two options." He said. Liara held her breath. She knew what was coming. "We can hide you. But you asari live for a long time. You can, anyhow, and that can get exhausting—and expensive—shuttling you from safe house to safe house until your body gives out or they catch up with you. The coward dies a thousand deaths, as they say." He sat down again, and looked at her, his expression so relaxed and so friendly that it terrified her. "Or, he said, we can put you back on the board."

Liara's blood ran cold. She had, directly or through intermediaries, run this same gambit a thousand times. Offer the false binary: flee and be a coward, or step out into the daylight for one brief, glorious moment that will make all the difference. Cowardice was a slippery thing, though, and bravery fleeting. It's the rare person who doesn't cower from time to time. And Liara had been brave enough for one lifetime, hadn't she? She had the semicircular scar across her belly to remind everyone that she had toed the line with Shepard, had faced death standing beside the legend, and had, in fact, very nearly died, had it not been for a surgeon's skill.

But then, like the fingers that tug at the loose thread that causes the entire cloth to unravel, she thought, Why not? Cowardice was a temptation, but so was the potential for taking action. And if she could oust Deniri, maybe she could— _No_ , she told herself, _Hope is a false goddess._

Liara said, "And how do you plan to put me on the board?"

"We'll use you as bait," Turner said. "Establish a safe house somewhere within Deniri's reach, put you there, and wait for her to strike."

"Please don't insult me," Liara said. "You could do that just as easily with a body double."

"We're a little short on access to asari, much less ones that look like you."

"Too bad you just killed a few hundred of them planetside. Poor planning on your part. In any case, Deniri wouldn't come herself. She would work through layers of intermediaries. She'd use someone in the SPECTRE corps, or Gray Squadron, or any of allies she has among the many mercenary companies that she has on retainer."

"It's just a starting point," Vance said.

"And and end," Liara said. "I've survived nearly three dozen separate attempts on my life. You might understand that I've grown cautious, and also weary of fending them off."

"I suppose you have a better idea?" Turner asked.

Liara glared, a sudden burst of rage getting the better of her. She balled her fist and said, "As a matter of fact, I do." Before anyone could move, Liara had pulled him across the room to her. She locked one arm around his throat and with the other hand freed his omnitool, sending out a burst of static energy that stunned Petty Officer Wilkes and would likely disable the feeds from any devices monitoring the room. Dropping the omnitool, she slammed Vance against the wall, while she choked Turner into unconsciousness, and cuffed his hand to Wilkes's foot. Vance was staggering back to her feet, looking dazed, but ready to fight. Liara pushed her, not too hard, against the wall again, and then took her by the throat. "Open the door."

"There's a dozen armed men waiting for you out there. You'll be dead before you take a step."

Liara flashed the pistol she'd lifted from Petty Officer Wilkes's holster. "Let's find out." Vance reached out and unlatched the door with passkey. Liara gestured for her to open it, while she stood to the side. All was quiet, and so she glanced out. Clear. Grabbing Vance by the collar, she pushed her out into the corridor, past three sealed hatches.

"I am sorry for the rough treatment," Liara said. "You're just a convenient means to an end."

"You'll never get away."

"So you tell me," Liara said. She had stopped in front of an emergency gear locker and gestured for Vance to open it.

"What are you doing?"

"Blue skin stands out, don't you think? Grab some rescue gear and put it on." Vance did as she was told. Liara did the same, pulling on the flashover hood, and the blast shield to cover her face. "Right," she said. "Now all we need is a fire." And with that she fired three rounds from the pistol into one of the electrical conduits, that exploded into a shower of sparks. Without waiting to see the results, she shouted at Vance, "Flight deck. You're going to get me a ship."


	6. Chapter 6: Fires

Fires

They had five more in need of funeral rites by morning.

At first light, the attacks had stopped, and the commandos disappeared into the forest to pursue. Nerai had killed two more, in the manner Liss had described. And now the remainder of the crew, what few of them there were, stood over the half-dozen dead, looking unsure whether they should be more troubled by the danger that had retreated into the forest, or by the danger that had followed the first, and that was certain to return.

Six bodies, laid out on a tarpaulin, cleaned now, but each with horrible wounds that couldn't be hidden. Minna, who'd lost a hand, and nearly her head. Beside her, Neela, whose spectacles had been broken, and now were tucked into the thigh pocket of her uniform. Crenna, one of Razia's scientists, flung to the ground and then trampled. Iliara, who'd been dragged over half the camp and shaken until her neck snapped. Aneris, who'd died of injuries during the attack.

Then there was Alina, from the engineering deck, who had fought brave as any of the commandos, and who had refused to abandon her spear when it had become caught between one of the creature's ribs, even as Nerai hit the animal with a power that ripped through the air and exploded with a force that had thrown everyone standing within twenty paces to the ground.

"Sister-wounds," Razia said, under her breath, as she'd helped lay out the bodies. "Unavoidable sometimes." Now she was gone, too, and the camp was very quiet. There were only twelve of them left now, not counting those who had departed on the _Nixia_ itself, still out there, apparently abandoned as it floated alongside the object stationed at the edge of the system.

Essa wanted only to retreat within herself, feel grief only for Neela, mourn only the one she had loved. But it wasn't that simple. She was Captian, and that mourning would have to come later, in the dark, away from camp, where no one could hear. Maybe she could abscond to the launch after dark, close the hatches so she could shout her heart's content.

But now, Orie was shouting for her. She would weep later.

At least it was passably good news. The commandos had returned from the forest, after having run the creatures down. They'd managed to kill two more by driving them over a cliff and into a large body of water below.

"That's the good news," Liss told her. The end of her spear was stained black with something that looked like tar, and was likely congealed blood. She had already stripped off her uniform, and was scrubbing at a nasty looking scrape that went from her collar bone to her left breast. "I'm fine," she said, when she caught Orie staring. "It was a broken branch that snapped back and caught me. It's not deep."

All the same, Orie eased her into a seated position, and began dabbing at the wound herself with a clean rag. She had been boiling scraps of cloth all day, just in case.

"You said there was bad news," Essa said, as the commando hissed her breath between her teeth.

"They're not stupid creatures," she said. "Far from it, in fact. We found a burrow, but if I had to call it anything, it would be a campsite. Might explain why they're attacking us."

"Explain."

"They might think we're trying to turf them out."

"Or," Orie said, quietly, "it's breeding season."

Liss rinsed her mouth out with a palmful of water and spat out a little blo. Spitting it into the fire, where it boiled away with an audible sizzle, she said, "As I told you. These things—they're smart. Not tactically, like we are. They don't know about flanking or weapons, but their lair, their _village_ —it was laid out like a five pronged star, burrows at the point of each prong. A fire pit. Things that looked like they might be tools. Neela would have—" Liss stopped herself, a moment too late.

Essa straightened up. "Shall I gather the science crew to go observe?"

Liss shook her head, and pointed. Out over the treetops, nearly ten kilometers out, a column of black smoke was rising into the oncoming wind. "We didn't leave anything standing. Nerai said she was going to see to that herself."

"Did you have to—" Orie had begun to say before Essa put up a hand.

"I can't command them to unkill, can I?" she said when Orie protested.

"Was it necessary?" she asked, "You can't just kill—"

"That's _enough_ , steward," Essa said, and dismissed Orie with a wave.

Liss smiled. "Necessary has too many meanings to be useful in my line of work," she said. "We found where they live, burned their dens, killed two of the fighters, and chased off more. It's what was necessary for living through the night."

Orie had gone pale. She stepped away from them, looking horrified. Not much later, the smell of burning flesh, diffuse but still unpleasant, reached the campsite.

#

Meanwhile there was a pyre to be built. Neela was Siari, and they preferred cremation to burial. Two of the others were members of the faith, and the rest had no religious preference listed in their records. Cremation would do for them all.

Essa was supposed to speak, and this weighed on her more than the lumps of woody material they were harvesting from the edge of the forest, than the worry about whether the slender trunks would burn long and hot enough to transform a body into ashes. What was she going to say, given that some of the other crew followed the new religion?

Siari broke with the orthodoxy of the cult of Athame. _One is all_ , they said, stating no preference for the goddess, over the priestesses who professed their religion on high and low altars across Thessia. She had their scriptures stored on a datapad in the tent she had, until this past night, shared with Neela, and when the short trajectory of the sun reached midday, she found herself digging through its various volumes, trying to sort some meaning from the words. She spent an hour watching the bodies being lifted onto the communal pyre, each, wrapped in a sheath made of grass, the pyre itself heaped with logs and bales of dry brush.

And then it was time to light the pyre. The remaining dozen stood in a ring around the mound, all of them looking at Essa like she should know what to say, and she, still unsure of her words, quoted instead from the Siari's third book of chants, the traditional funeral blessing:

 _In the dark, said the Prophet, is when the universe was born from single drop of light. It grew, and grew, and grows still, twisting and branching through the dark, like a tree._

 _And yet like the tree that would not recognize the seed from whence it sprung, the seed is everywhere in the tree, as the tree is everywhere in the seed._

 _So we are of that first drop of light, and yet we do not know it. A life comes and goes, the light continues. From our weak and mortal flesh, we must return the light to its source, the thing that is us, and that the body cannot hold forever._

 _Lighting the fires, we mark the division of light and of flesh, each goes to its appointed place, at the appointed time._

Yes, it was all very comforting wasn't it, the idea that some part of us endures, beyond the body. But what solace was there, really, in knowing that the fire that was lit before we came, would be there to embrace us again, in the end? It seemed like folly, to Essa, like a boldfaced lie, to say that in this moment when everything was so clearly falling apart, that it would all somehow still come out all right. But then she'd stopped speaking for too long, and so, she turned to light the fire from the torch Orie had made for this purpose just an hour earlier. The flames started slowly, then took hold in the bundles of dry brush, rising so high it seemed the fire would leap out and take hold in the trees to the west. Then it nearly gave out, and the heat, dying away, left the sweat that had beaded on Essa's back and shoulders a moment earlier running cold, in the night wind.

For a moment she thought the fire was about to die, when she saw, relieved, new threads of white flame licking between the cracks of the larger blocks of wood.

She stood back and surveyed the mound of logs, topped with its platform, with six pairs of callused and discolored feet protruding from their simple wrappings. Neela, having died first, was on the far right of the group. Soon the flames had reached the platform, and in the heat it seemed to shift under its burden. Essa fought the urge to jump away, and instead stood to watch for a good long while. When the bodies were no longer visible behind a wall of flames, she gestured for the first watch to take their positions, while everyone else moved back into camp to take on the last of their evening duties.

It was sunset by the time Essa had managed to free herself from the last of the questions before disappearing down the trail toward the meadow where the launch sat, parked out in the open.

She jogged from the edge of camp to the woods. There, in Athame's twilight she thought she saw a body moving. Essa stopped, and glanced around her. Nothing but shadows. She waited a moment longer, then pressed on, hopping over a few fallen logs, and over a patch of wet ground, where, in the low light she saw the shape of Neela's foot pressed into the mud. It had to be hers—she'd stopped wearing her boots after only a few days, realizing it was easier to go barefoot, and there, Essa saw the imprint, heel, arch, ball and toes, the ground holding the memory of the body that had stepped there once just a day earlier.

Essa, almost without realizing it, had crouched down to touch it, but as she did, the weight of her own body made the ground begin to slip and change shape. How could Neela be gone, when the world still held a trace of her? There must be more, and indeed there were half a dozen other prints where the wet ground had taken on the shape of her foot.

And still, what was left was the sign only, the negative space Neela's body had made passing by, not the body, but something that would hold her for a while, just the way Essa would hold her in her memory, and would eventually disappear herself. It would rain tomorrow, or the next day—thundershowers had been coming at predictable intervals—and then the footprints would be gone, too. Essa felt the pressure of Neela's head on her chest, of her hands touching her, of her voice, the little bit of her scent that still clung to Essa's dirty uniform.

Essa forced herself to move on, finding the edge of the forest, where the launch sat on its tall landing gear in the center of broad gap in the forest. There was no shelter, not even tall grass, and any creature that wanted to attack her, if something were lurking, this is where it would wait. The launch was still nearly three hundred meters away. A long and hard sprint, and from what she'd seen of the creatures that were attacking them, she'd be easily overtaken, long before she reached the launch, and anyhow there was too much space between its belly, and the ground for there to be adequate shelter for her to hide, while she waited for the hatch to open, and the entry ladder to drop down.

So she lingered at the edge of the trees, in a hole in the hacked-away undergrowth, listening, though she wasn't sure for what. There was her own breathing, her own heart, beating hard, then slowing, slowing. The breeze shifted, and something whistled in the night, the call of a creature that thus far no one had been able to identify. In the distance she heard her crew singing, and the crackle of the fire burning down. The heap of logs slumped, and the sound of the fire changed. She looked out into the starlight and saw the dark shape of the launch, against the darker far edge of the woods. Then something seemed to move behind the launch, and all of Essa's muscles clenched.

She kept still and listened, and then she heard a snort, like something trying to stifle a sneeze, and a heavy foot stomping the ground. She thought she saw movement again, and crouching low, she moved out of the undergrowth, checking her flanks for an ambush. Seeing nothing, she continued on.

There was another snort and stamping, and then the ground shook. Something had bumped against the launch, causing it to lurch on its landing gear. Essa was running now. The launch had a dry weight of nearly fifty thousand kilograms, and at present it was fully fueled. Whatever had made it move was big. She was moving steadily toward the craft now, was only fifty meters away when the launch shook again, listing hard on its landing gear, so that one of the struts sounded as though it might snap off.

No time to go back to camp. No time to do anything, not even care that she was unarmed and that there were two of those creatures on the far side of the launch, working at its starboard winglet, getting their heads under it and lifting with all their strength, trying to flip it on its side.

What would she do when she got there? They hadn't seen her yet. They might not until the last possible moment, and that surprise might allow Essa to—she didn't know. Just get to the ship, she thought, get the hatch open. Get inside. After that, you can think.

The ship lurched again, though, not quite as hard as the last time, but the creatures, between their bouts of grunting and snorting, seemed to be engaged in discussing what to do. Their talk sounded like long purrs, its pitch higher than Essa would have thought.

She had reached the nose gear, where the entry controls were located. It was a miracle that the creatures hadn't spotted her yet, but by some trick of luck, they were both facing in the opposite direction, looking up at the starboard winglet. Essa pulled the lever and the hatch dropped, and along with it came the entry ladder. It took a full five seconds to descend. It would take five more to retract, but she'd have to worry about that part later, after she survived the climb.

There was the ladder, still not all the way down, but with a jump she'd caught her elbow around the third rung and was pulling herself up.

But the things had seen her now. It didn't matter, she was moving, up, up, even as the ladder was still working against her for another moment. Something slammed against the launch and threw her sideways, and the noise of the creatures and their awful groans were all around her. She lost her grip and nearly fell.

Then the launch dropped back to level, and she climbed again. Something grazed her foot, and in a panic she heaved the top half of her body on the cockpit floor, leaving her legs dangling still exposed, while her hands searched on the floor for a handhold, something, to pull herself aboard, pushing with the one foot that was still touching a ladder rung, pushing still, and another lurch moved the ship so that it pivoted a degree or two around the nose gear, and then her hand closed on a cargo loop and she was all the way through, her legs under her on the flight deck.

Essa was in the left chair before she could even remember standing up, was flipping switches and buckling her belts, listening for the sound of the little reactor powering up, watching the fuel indicators, watching the avionics, the different panels all showing boot screens or static, then each coming to life. She flipped another switch, and the ladder retracted and the hatch flipped shut. For the moment she was safe, until the creatures found a way to break through the pressure vessel.

The ship rattled and took a hard turn this time, one that sent a terrible noise through the frame, the sound of something creaking, bending even, maybe almost to the breaking point. But Essa's hands were on the controls now, and she felt the ship respond. The thrusters were ready, and she dialed one open, then a second, and then hit the throttles, and the ship lifted itself up into a cloud of dirt and smoke and burning debris.

She lifted off fifteen meters, and spun the craft slowly through a circle, looking for the creatures, sure she would have scared them off, or that the force of the liftoff would have killed them, or caused them some other harm.

And there they were. They'd retreated a bit, but not far as she had hoped. She slipped the launch closer to them, hoping the engine noise would bother them enough that they would run. The two creatures shuffled backward, but seemed more bewildered than anything else.

Essa increased the throttle incrementally, and evened out her hover at twenty meters. As she spun the launch around, she suddenly spotted a third, and then a fourth creature approaching from the treeline. While she watched, something struck the side of the ship, and caused it to swerve toward the trees. Essa hit the forward braking thrusters, which were pointed directly at one of the onrushing creatures. It had been close enough to the flare that its fur had caught fire. Now it lay rolling around in the dirt, legs flailing ineffectively in the air. As Essa looked on in disbelief, something else struck the top of the ship, and debris, tree bark and leaves, rolled down over the pilot's windscreen. Essa rotatated back toward the first two attackers, who were grabbing fallen tree trunks and throwing them at the ship.

She aimed the launch's nose at them and at the last moment hit them both with a blast from the thrusters. She leveled out, set the ship to hover, and saw that she'd killed the one outright. Contact with the hot exhaust had cut the creature into pieces that lay sprawled here and there across a triangle of grass that she'd scorched bare. The other was hurt, and trying to run away. It didn't get far, before it, too, had suffered the same fate.

Essa turned to face the last one, the one that stood at the edge of the trees, as though waiting for her to come for it. She obliged.

She was going to kill every last one of them now. Every last one.

She realized a moment too late her mistake. There were more hiding just beyond the edge of the forest, and this group was armed with rocks that they flung—how, she didn't understand—with terrible accuracy, striking the windscreen, made of a polymer that would scratch, but was too thick to break, and then, less fortunately, one of the starboard thrusters.

The thruster stuck in the on position and nearly flipped the launch onto its back before Essa could get it shut off. With that thruster gone, she couldn't hold the ship in a hover for more than a few seconds at a time. She gunned the throttle, just clearing the trees, then circled back to where the creatures continued to launch stones at her from beneath the canopy. She took two more hits before she'd positioned the ship, then she lit her main engines, propelling her over the clearing and skyward and forcing her body into the padding of her seat. She nearly blacked out as the maneuver forced all her blood into her legs, then as she regained her faculties, she realized there was an alarm going off inside the cockpit.

During the confusion of the attack, Essa had remembered to put up the landing gear, but hadn't checked to see if they'd properly retracted. Now she saw that the nose pylon had remained stuck in the down position, and, worse, that with the strain that the animals had put on it, along with the force of acceleration when—she hoped—she had killed the last of them, it was now leaking hydraulic fluid. She could land, but it might buckle under the weight of the ship.

But it was worse than that. The leak had drained enough fluid that Essa couldn't lower the rear landing struts.

There wasn't anything she could do about it. She had to put the ship down. It was either that or run for orbit, because the maneuvering thruster was behaving more and more erratically. So she eased up on the throttles. The launch veered and slowed, but there was a crosswind and the ship lurched into the ground, landing hard on the damaged starboard winglet, and skidding in a fifty meter-long semicircle, before coming to rest against a rock.

The hard landing had jarred Essa, but she wasn't hurt, except for friction burns where the seatbelts had rubbed bare skin. The floor hatch wouldn't open, with the ship belly-down on the deck, but the main airlock was still operable. She could get out. At least there was that, she thought.

Off in the distance, the creature that she'd set on fire had staggered into a pile of dry brush and set it alight. Beyond that, the a few dozen trees at the edge of the forest were on fire. The engines powered down, and as they did, Essa realized that she'd managed to beat the animals back, but all she could do was sit at the controls and sob.

#

Later—it was dawn and a light rain was falling—Liss came up behind her, where Essa sat slumped at the controls. The hand on her shoulder was so gentle it felt more like a warm breath of air. Liss's uniform was wet, and her face was streaked with soot. She looked pale in the dim light. The main airlock was open, and one of the commandos and Orie were inside the ship, inspecting it for damage.

"Captain," Liss said. "Captain?"

"I'm here," Essa said. "I'm awake."

"What did you do?" she asked.

"I killed them," she said. "I killed every last one of them. Didn't I?" Liss recoiled a little. It took Essa a moment to realize that she'd been smiling as she'd said this.

"You may have," she said. "Nerai and Commandant Razia are out there now. They've counted seventeen corpses so far. "Large and small," Liss said. "Adults. Juveniles." She seemed less sanguine about the killing than she had the day before.

"I had to," Essa said.

Liss shook her head. "You _wanted_ to." She let out a long breath, then said, "For what it's worth, sometimes you can't tell the difference." She put her hand back on Essa's shoulder. "The hull's all beat to hell, by the way. Lots of dents and scratches on the forward heat shield."

Essa was quiet. "She's gone," she said, her voice just a whisper. "Neela's gone."

Liss squeezed her shoulder, but said nothing.

Essa put her head back in her hands and leaned forward in the pilot's seat. Liss let her sob for a long time. The rain fell hard for a while then tapered off, until the burnt and torn-open corpses of the creatures Essa had killed became easily visible in the distance. Little black and gray creatures, no bigger than fists that flew on pairs of stubby leather wings, were feeding on the dead flesh.

Suddenly Liss let go of Essa's shoulder. She asked, "What's that?"

Essa raised her head and wiped her eyes, looking through the forward windscreen. "Where?" she said. "I don't see anything."

But Liss was pointing at the comms panel. There was a transmission from the _Nixia_. _Flash message,_ Nixia _actual._ It read. _Departing present station in zero zero zero on return vector encoded in this message. Repeat, departing immediately on return vector encoded with this message. Transmission ends._

"Oh, thank the goddess," Essa said. "They're coming to get us."


	7. Chapter 7: After Action Report, Part I

_Everyone dies._

 _Asari can live many centuries, Benezia once told Liara, but that doesn't mean they will. When we do, the hardest thing is to face the silence that was once filled by old friends. The longer you go on, the quieter the world becomes._

 _Kaden on Virmire._

 _About half of the_ Normandy _'s Cerberus crew, on the Collector Base. Kelly Chambers and Mess Sargent Gardner._

 _Mordin on Tuchanka. Grunt in the caverns on Utukku. Legion on Rannoch. Thane in Huerta Memorial after being stabbed through the chest._

 _Cortez, shot down over London. Anderson disappeared into the ruins and was never found. Shepard on the Citadel._

 _Ashley Williams, in a training accident. Garrus, killed in action on Taetrus. Kasumi, captured during a heist, put in prison on Horizon, and disappeared from custody shortly thereafter. Never heard from again._

 _Admiral Hackett, in a chaise, overlooking the beach on Horizon, two decades into his retirement._

 _Joker, from injuries after a fall. Lawson, disappeared on Tortuga. Vega, shot to death during a suspected robbery near San Diego on Earth._

 _Jack, metastatic tumors in the brain and lungs, likely a result of Cerberus experimentation. Zaeed, killed serving as bodyguard to the Alliance Councilor. Jacob Taylor, suicide._

 _Wrex, beaten in single combat by a challenger._

 _Samantha Traynor, radiation exposure, on an orbital of Eden Prime. Chakwas, natural causes. Tali'Zorah vas Normandy, complications from a condition known as Rannoch Lung._

 _And Samara, killed while chasing a rogue SPECTRE on Ilium._

 _And before them all, the protheans, wiped out, but for one, who still lived in the jungles of a sparsely inhabited world in the Terminus. Aside from Javik, there was only EDI, who was one contained within many, instead of many within one, unlike Legion who had been many within one._

 _The quiet bothered Liara, but there it was. And in it, she had sometimes suspected, though was never able to prove, that there might have been a pattern._


	8. Chapter 8: Counterstrike

Counterstrike

The ruse held, Vance saw. With her hood up, and with a human body ahead of her, the damage control teams they passed didn't notice the pistol, or her blue hands. In a quarter hour, they'd ascended toward the exterior hull, where the _Whitman_ 's ships were stored in their launch tubes.

Below decks, all hell was breaking loose. The small fire had damaged a plasma line, and soon there were calls for a medic on deck sixteen.

They had made it as far as the launch deck, where the prisoner stopped and pushed her against the wall.

"Move and I will kill you," she said. Vance did not doubt it. She suspected that Chief Wilkes or Turner, or both, had been mortally wounded. As though she'd understood Vance's thoughts, the asari said, "I didn't kill them. I don't, if I don't have to. Now put this on."

She thrust a lightly armored flight suit at Vance. They would need it for the launch deck. The crew there wore the suits in case there was an atmosphere breech. While Vance put on her suit, the prisoner pulled up a schematic of the launch deck on a nearby screen. "Here," she said, pointing at a particular ship. "This one."

"I can't unlock it."

"You won't have to," the asari said. The direction of the ship changed. She felt it under her boots. "We're maneuvering," the prisoner told her. And in an instant, the floor rumbled. Vance looked up at the screen.

"They're scrambling the ready fighters," she said.

The asari studied the screen again, and smiled. Somehow she had put on her own flight suit without Vance seeing. "Helmets," she said. "Visors down, understood?"

Vance nodded. "Combat operations," she said. "It would look suspicious if we did otherwise."

Out they went, through the airlock and onto the main deck. Another wing of ready fighters launched, as they turned right out of the lock, and made their way across the deck, using weapons racks and other equipment to screen their movement. They turned right again, and were soon walking toward midships, a busy location right now. Pilots ran to meet the prep crews. Auto-loaders fed weapons into internal launch bays, while semi-autonomous loader mechs lifted empty loading racks clear.

The asari hurried skillfully through the controlled chaos, until she had reached a hatch that stood open on the deck. "Here," she said.

Vance looked down into the interior of the ship, a Phantom. An odd, but interesting choice, she realized. It was a picket ship, a low-energy stealth craft that didn't look like much from the outside, but that were often deployed in screening orbits, where they would patrol on the drift for days or weeks. They were known for running cold for a long time, then powering up and taking out the screening ships of a flotilla. A single squadron of fighters like these could decide a battle before it even began, though with the galaxy at relative peace, they'd never had to. Not yet. Unlike most fighters, they could interact with a Mass Relay.

The asari saw Vance hesitate as she worked through all this information. "I'm not going to kill you," she said. "I need you to get us launch clearance." She gestured toward an interphone console bolted to the deck. "Plug in and see if you can get us free."

Vance hesitated again. Helping the prisoner was treason. And then suddenly the ship jolted sideways, not much, but Vance knew what it was.

"We just took a hit."

"It went off the barriers. We need to get free before one penetrates. Understood?"

Vance did, but still didn't want to believe it. The ship moved again and she was suddenly on her knees by the panel. A flash of light passed over her, and somewhere just beyond the curve of the deck, a hole had opened up. The link cable was in her hand, and in an instant she'd plugged it into the port on the chest of her suit. The ship's serial number and the callsign for the day appeared on the display. She punched the button for the deck chief's station. "Hitman 3-1 to Deck Command, over."

When the answer came, the chief sounded busy. There was an alarm going off in the background, and voices shouting over each other. "This is Deck actual. Make it quick, Hitman 3-1."

Vance said, calm as she could, "Hit man 3-1 requesting immediate launch clearance and release."

"Your squadron isn't tasked, Hitman 3-1. Wait on orders."

Vance cleared her throat. "We were just tasked. Fire mission in sector 819."

"Not on my board, Hitman 3-1. Stand down until—" There was a loud sound on the other end, and the deck shook hard enough that Vance was thrown flat against the console.

"Say again, Deck Actual."

There was no answer but for static. Vance cycled through the channels, but in the outermost hull there was a circle nearly ten meters across. Its edges glowed hot orange, and through it, she saw a patch of stars. She switched the comms to the cockpit feed. "Deck Command just got taken out. We're going to have to blow the clamps manually."

"Understood," came the reply, and an instant later, the asari appeared in the hatchway.

Vance pointed at the hardpoints. "There's three of them, there, there, and there. We'll need to blow them simultaneously.

"Right," the asari said. "We'll set a timer for the first, and blow the second two. Regroup in the airlock."

Vance shook her head and reached for the asari's pistol. In an instant she was in a wrist lock, and a knee had forced all the air from her lungs. Her faceplate was spattered with a roundel of saliva and mucus. The asari grabbed her and threw her into the ship. An instant later, she heard the clamps being armed and then a loud clap as all three separated at nearly the same instant. The fighter began drifting away from its mooring in the interior hull, and bounced against the hard surface of exterior hull, five meters below. As Vance struggled to gain a foothold, the asari appeared in the opening of the airlock. Vance tried to force herself up toward the interior hatch. The asari threw her back against the hard flooring of the fighter, and Vance blacked out for a moment.

When she came to, the hatches were sealed and locked, and she was halfway buckled into the copilot's chair, her writs tied to the armrests to prevent her from interfering.

"Are you quite done?" the asari said. Vance didn't say anything, but was quickly regaining consciousness. Vance nodded as best she could inside the helmet. The cockpit spun a little when she did. "Good," the asari said. She got into the pilot's seat and steadied the fighter inside the hull. Using maneuvering jets, she found a hole in the outer hull large enough for their ship to fit through, and then blasted out into the dark of space.

#

Out ahead, a chaos of drive plumes, debris, weapons and detonations. She watched as the HUD tracked MAC rounds, and torpedoes. Fighter squadrons darted in and out of view, and out in front of them, the massive propulsion flare of an asari dreadnought.

"They're coming from out of the ecliptic," the asari said. "Common attack maneuver in the fleet. Slash from above or below, and then burn hard as you pass straight through the enemy formation."

"High risk," Vance said. "In simulation we regularly inflicted losses of thirty percent."

"High reward," the asari said. "And this isn't a simulation." She studied the situation on the display, and glanced upward through the fighter's canopy. When she'd finished, she put the blast shield down. "We'll be clear of the body of your fleet. We may slip by unnoticed."

Vance looked through the canopy. One of the troop ships had split open, the edges of the rent in its hull, still hot to glowing, and a cloud of debris expanding outward from its interior. Two other ships had been crippled, but the attack had cost the asari fleet, too. A cruiser had plunged through the battlegroup, and exited with its drivecone damaged, a massive jet of gas was venting out through a giant hole in the near side of the ship's hull. The hot plume was nearly a hundred kilometers across. A reactor breech had probably killed the crew already, Vance thought, but as she watched, the cruiser's hull began to glow, red, then orange-yellow, then white. It began to stretch, and then tear, and finally failed completely, ripping the ship apart, stern to bow, sending out a bright flash of light, followed by two rapidly expanding plumes of gas and wreckage, spreading along the axis where the hull had split.

The attack had been meant to scatter the Alliance force, but the fleet had maintained discipline, and though about a third of the ships had taken damage, the bulk of the fleet held together. They were already regrouped around the _Whitman,_ and had executed a hard turn and burn maneuver in pursuit.

Vance took all of this in just a few seconds. Almost as quickly, she understood that the debris field from the battle was concentrated right now, but was rapidly expanding. If they accelerated hard and didn't maneuver too much, they might be taken for a bit of wreckage, or maybe a fighter that had been jettisoned after suffering irrecoverable damage on the flight deck.

No one was going to come looking for her, she realized. At least not for a while, until someone reviewed all the security feeds on the _Whitman_ , provided that the ship survived the coming battle.

By then, they would be long gone.

The asari said, "I thought we might have to wait for them to leave the system, but it appears we're in luck." She began programming the Phantom's VI to direct them to the mass relay.

"You think no one will notice we're missing."

The asari shook her head and unsealed her helmet. "We're out of danger for the moment." The mechanical way that she said this, given their circumstances, suddenly filled Vance with dread. She wanted to run, but there was nowhere to go, except out the airlock.

She kept quiet, but her vision grew blurry. The asari handed her a rag.

"Tears don't run out of your eyes in microgravity," she said, breaking the silence. "Do you have family?" she asked.

"Why are you asking me that?"

"It's a simple question. Do you?"

Vance didn't answer.

The asari said, "It was just me and my mother. She was—let's say she was distant. Yes? That's something humans say, don't they?" Vance agreed that they did. "And you know who I am. My mother—she's been somewhat forgotten by your historians. With them it's always Commander Shepard this and reapers that. Well, I knew them both, and my mother was right there with them. On the wrong side, of course, which is perhaps why they forget her more often than not." She paused and studied the threat board again. The two fleets were ready to clash again. The asari cruisers had turned on their axis, and were firing while their momentum carried them away from the body of the Alliance battlegroup. "They're firing interdiction rounds. I suspect your comrades will break their pursuit."

The asari went quiet, as though she'd lost the thread of their conversation, and Vance said, "I've read about your mother. She was a hero to your people."

"For a time," the asari said. "Then she was a blight on the asari name. In any case, you know the story about Saren, and _Sovereign_ , and the rest."

"I don't remember it in detail."

"Likely you didn't hear that it was I who killed her. On Noveria." Vance shook her head. The asari went on, "I hadn't seen her in a decade. She'd been working on joint projects between the Intelligence Directorate and the SPECTRE program. I didn't know what that meant at the time. I do now—she'd been chasing leads across the galaxy about rumors of a powerful starship that turned out to be a reaper. Much later, not until minutes before I shot her twice in the chest, did I realize she'd been suffering from the long-term effects of indoctrination. As she died, she said something to me that I didn't understand for a long time. She called me 'Little Wing,' right at the end. It's an old nickname, but she hadn't used it since I was very small." The asari was quiet again for a moment. She said, "A little over ten years ago, I began tracking down leads related to information my mother left behind."

"For you?"

"No—" the asari said. "She began hiding information centuries before I was born, but even then, she knew someone was working against her, trying to sideline her, or silence her, if they could, and she left behind what she knew in caches scattered all over the galaxy. In the end, I was the one who silenced her. Now Matirarch Deniri has effectively silenced me with this war of hers."

"You think the asari went to war to keep your story quiet?"

"Perhaps not directly. There are other forces at work. The krogan are again expanding into the asari and salarian bubbles. The Citadel Council was fragmented and likely to fall apart. The leviathan may have broken their section of the Dekkuna Accords. Not to mention the arms race between your Alliance and the Turian Hierarchy. Somehow you must have known that would work against you."

Vance ignored the jab, and instead asked, "But what do you know that's worth keeping quiet."

The asari looked at the threat board again. Nothing there had changed. "I'm honestly not sure, but I know this. My mother and Deniri were friends. For a time. They were part of a commando unit known as The Lovers—I'll leave you to speculate as to why they called themselves that. After my mother left to join the Intelligence Directorate, the friendship broke, and was never repaired. I suspect there was more to it than just a quarrel. Now that I know what I know, I think Deniri might be concealing something worse than just governmental intrigue."

"Indoctrination?" Vance said. "But how? The reapers are gone."

"Are they?" the asari said. "They're not all accounted for."

The cramped space of the cockpit suddenly felt close and impossibly hot. She pushed open the faceplate on her helmet and tried to slow her breathing.

The asari put a hand on her shoulder. "It's a great deal to take in," she said. "I can't quite fathom it yet either. I'd like you to know," she said, as she pulled the pistol from her thigh holster, "I did mean it when I said I wouldn't kill you." She stripped out the ammunition block and handed it to Vance. "I would set you free, but I can't just yet. You're useful to me, and I need you. Call me Liara if you like."

Vance sat in stunned silence. When the asari didn't speak again, Vance slipped the ammo block into a loop in her belt. She would work on getting the pistol later.

Meanwhile, for nearly an hour, Liara sat quietly while Vance dozed. Liara said again, "You have family back on Earth, don't you?"

Vance nodded. "My mother and a sister. Back on Earth."

"Good," the asari said. "That wasn't so hard, was it?" Vance shook her head. All of a sudden her burned ear was throbbing, and she pulled off her helmet to rub it. "Why are you in the Alliance?"

Vance looked up at the asari. The hard look, the fearless look she'd seen in the interrogation room, on the flight deck, and as they maneuvered out of the battle—it was gone. She seemed genuinely curious. Still, Vance held her tongue.

"Let me guess, you were running away from your drab little hometown." After a pause, she said, "Or maybe you were good at school, and wanted to do more, but there was no money. Maybe both. You're from Glasgow, aren't you?"

Vance shook her head. "How—?"

"We live a long time. Some of us are curious and, since we have nothing but time, we absorb a lot." The threat board showed both groups of ships arcing away from each other, though the Alliance ships seemed to be repositioning for a counter attack. She stared at the two fleets for a while, then whispered something to herself.

"You're wondering why they're here, aren't you?"

Vance nodded, but didn't answer.

"How many aboard that troop ship? Three thousand? Five thousand?"

"About that?"

"And the heavy cruiser?"

"Two hundred," Vance said, "not counting shipboard marines."

"About twice as many aboard the _Rumaila_ , the asari ship that just foundered." She was quiet for a moment. "The asari battlegroup will likely be torn to pieces by your fleet."

"That's a lot of lives wasted on bad strategy."

"It's not bad strategy if it works. They were sent to kill me, as I suspected when your intelligence man told me you'd broadcast my name to the galaxy."

"We didn't—" Vance started to say, but the asari interrupted.

"You might as well have. Something tells me your colleague might have done it on purpose."

"And that's why they're here? To kill _you_?"

"I guarantee it."

Vance was quiet. Turner was a prick, and she wasn't going to miss him. Still.

The asari tugged at her straps, making sure they were secure. "Seven hours, give or take. Sensors aren't showing pickets at the relay, so we may not have anything to worry about."

"And from there?"

"I'll let you know soon enough."

"Yes, but where are we going?"

"Have you ever been to Omega?"

Vance nodded. The memory was not a pleasant one.

"Well," the asari said. "Prepare yourself. Tortuga is a good deal worse."


	9. Chapter 9: RadioSilence

There it was, in the telescope's viewfinder on the launch's navigation console. Half the instruments were broken, their panels cracked and showing nothing but static or a few lines of error code. But the telescope, as simple as it was, worked as intended and there was the _Nixia_ , a little flare of light, just beyond invisible. Its engines had cut out already, and the ship was coasting until its next timed burn, but its glowing orange and blue beacons showed where it was, and it was moving. It was coming to get them.

That was about all they knew. After the initial message, there was no further communication for several days. And then, a databurst, transmitted by a secondary low gain antenna that said only, _Main array damaged. Attempting repairs._ Along with it came a basic readout of the ship's system status, life support, and fuel stores. Essa looked it over, and stored the information on a card to analyze later.

Meanwhile on the ground, there was so much to do. So much that for three days she nearly forgot that Neela was dead, so much so that she more than once caught herself looking for her other half in the dwindling group of scientists and commandos who remained in the camp. All were covered in dirt, their uniforms in tatters after almost three years on this planet that had taken so much from them. The creatures had assaulted their camp, and taken six of their number had let off in their attacks, but there was still a group out there in the forest. The commandos heard their clicks and whistles, as they called to one another, and found footprints at the edge of the four kilometer-wide clearing where they had set down the launch.

The launch. There was their only hope, and on that morning, the day after the _Nixia_ had transmitted its imminent arrival, Essa had taken stock of it, and all that had to be done to make it fly again. The list was long. The nose gear had cracked and would no longer bear the ship's weight. Getting proper clearance between ship and ground to eliminate blowback damage would be a challenge. Essa set the commandos to building a cradle out of wood that would hold the launch aloft as it powered up and lifted off. The cradle would double as a means of egress and entry. The ventral landing gear had suffered damage as well, and would need to be jettisoned once the ship was airborne, which was just as well, because they would need to shed the weight, in order to make orbit.

The heat shield was irreparably damaged, but they wouldn't be needing that, at least not for the ascent phase. The forward windscreen was cracked, and the aft wall of the pressure vessel had bent, and may have had a microscopic fracture that could blow out in the vacuum of space. The copilot's instrumentation was mostly fried, as were most of the controls. The starboard maneuvering thruster was stuck in the on position, and best case would likely begin leaking fuel when turned on, and worst case, flip the launch over and send it careening into the ground at worst.

But Essa knew the _Nixia_ , every meter of wire, every deck tile, every switch and button and foam padded acceleration chair. And to know the _Nixia_ was to know the launch just as well. If she had a year, she'd have stripped it herself. She didn't have a year. The _Nixia_ was coming to get them. Neither the ship, nor the camp had an unlimited supply of food. They had to get ready.

#

Next time she looked, the _Nixia_ had streaked nearly seven degrees across the night sky, the lights on its bow and stern beacons were visibly separate from one another. By then, the launch's starboard thruster had been removed, disassembled, and, Goddess willing, would soon fit together again in the unstuck position.

The camp, meanwhile, had moved from its earlier location by the stream, to an area just a hundred meters away from the launch itself, which sat in its wooden cradle like an animal with three broken and splinted legs. The commandos had, in almost no time at all, rigged a pipe made of wrist-thick reeds that delivered enough water for drinking and other basic needs, but little more than that.

Stopping to survey the work on the fourth afternoon, Essa said to Nerai, who stood holding her daughter, "They'll be here in a month. I'm concerned about the crack in the windscreen. It could blow out once we're orbital."

"So we wear enviro suits."

"We don't have enough to go around. Even if we did, we wouldn't all fit in the launch. Not with all our gear."

"Ditch the gear."

"Even then."

"Someone's going to have to draw the short straw," Nerai said.

"Themis is working with the fabricator now. She says she's got a design for a kind of putty-mesh that should hold the screen together."

"Should," Nerai said, "Is not the same as will." She set Orinna down, and looked at Essa, her meaning clear.

Essa nodded.

Nerai thought a moment. She seemed to be studying the launch. "I've taken some insane risks in my time," she said. "A lot of them because I drew the short straw." After a moment, she said, "I remember every one of them, every stupid thing I've ever done in the interest of getting the job done. I've got four pieces of metal in my body because of them, but—well I'm a survivor. That's what Razia calls me. But today, I couldn't look you in the eye and tell you that any of them were worth it."

"What are you saying?"

"If you're going to take me back up there, I'm going to need to _know_ that pressure vessel will do better than just 'probably' hold together. If you can't tell me that, I'd much rather take my chances dirtside."

Essa shook her head. "We didn't come with much extra material. The mesh is our best shot."

Nerai shook her head. She spat out a wad of leaves that she and the other commandos sometimes chewed to stay alert.

"And Orinna?"

"I think she'll do better dirtside, too."

Essa looked up. Night was coming on, and soon it would be time to climb back into the launch to use its telescope array to track the _Nixia_. Before the ship had departed nearly a year ago, Essa and Clea, the third watch navigator, had worked out their position relative to Thessia and their path through the galaxy. After a dozen jumps, they had a good sense of where they were, and where they had been. From Thessia, they had traveled an irregular zigzag path from their home system across Demeter's Staff. One long jump, their first, accounted for nearly sixty percent of the distance covered. They had launched themselves out, and were now—slowly but steadily—tracing a path back toward Thessia. The remainder of their jumps had been much shorter traverses of a few dozen light years each. The path hadn't made much sense to Essa or to Clea, but Neela had been working on a hypothesis just before she'd died. She believed that there was a pattern to the path they had followed. Unable to sleep Essa turned to it one night, and having looked it over, hurried over to Clea's lean-to.

The navigator, who had been asleep, rubbed her eyes and studied the panel. "What is it?"

"I wanted your opinion." Clea looked up from her bedroll. She knew that wasn't worth waking her in the middle of the night. "It's important," Essa said. "Tell me what you learn." Clea nodded and promised she would.

A day later, she returned, looking nervous, nearly sick with worry.

"What is it, Ensign?" Essa said.

She took out Neela's old panel and began scrolling through the data, with her own notes scrawled in the margins.

"Listen," Clea said, "Any scientist would tell you that this doesn't make any sense."

"You're in luck, Ensign. I'm a sailor."

Clea looked like she were trying to force herself to smile, gave up, and then turned to her findings again. "Virtually every system we've visited had an inhabitable world," she said. "Air, fresh water, in most cases edible food." She drew a breath and another.

"Finish your thought," Essa said. She'd been sharper with the crew since Neela died. Killing the creatures that had taken her away, there was a comfort in that, but now that they had retreated beyond the wall of the forest, there was nowhere else to put her rage.

"It's like something knew we would need to resupply along the way."

"You're saying this was planned?"

Clea shook her head. "Those installations. How old do you think they are?" Before Essa could interject, she said, "Thousands of years? Maybe more? The biologists found evidence of plants that predate the modern epoch growing onboard the one in Parnitha." Lately the crew, by some unspoken agreement, had been referring to home by the parent star, rather calling Thessia by name. Essa found it unsettling. She also noticed that Clea had skillfully avoided using Neela's name, by saying _biologists_. Clea had returned to studying her star map. With her finger she circled the systems where they had landed to gather resources. "There were very old ruins here," she said. Essa nodded, and had a brief memory of the horror she'd seen, when she touched the little blade-thin device when they had landed there, and that still lay hidden at the bottom of a storage compartment in the lab aboard the Nixia. "Everywhere else we've been, we've found these bushes with berries. The biologists—" again, the skillful avoidance "—told— _tell—_ me that the plants have a very distinct life cycle. How is it that we always happen to find them when they're bearing fruit? Has it been merely random that we should arrive on a handful of separate planets where it just happens to be early summer? Or are we being _directed_?"

Essa wondered long and hard about that. "Say that we are," she said finally, "I need to know what that means."

"There was a civilization," Clea said. "That much we know for sure. It spanned—I don't know if we can imagine how far across the galaxy. Perhaps all of Demeter's staff, or beyond. Who knows?"

"And they're the ones directing us?"

"Or something they left behind. It's almost as if someone wanted us to see that there's nothing left."

"Meaning what? That it's safe to go exploring?"

"Or as a warning." Clea put her hand over her mouth, as though she hadn't meant to say it. For a moment she looked to be on the verge of tears. She took a deep breath while pressing her hands together. "I don't think this is over. I don't think whatever our crewmates learned up _there_ is going to get us home. Not right away."

"I'll take that under advisement," Essa said and patted Clea's shoulder. "Get back to work, all right?"

#

Forget love, Essa thought, as she returned to her lean to at the edge of the clearing. It was after sunset, the end of a long day—as long as the days on this planet ever got. Forget the endless soft pleasures. Forget comfort in knowing that she didn't have to meet this struggle alone. Forget the gentle spirit, the warm breath in the night, the intimacy of bonding in which some small part of Neela remained present, and always would. What was missing tonight was the raw intellect that could penetrate through the layers of conjecture and see a pattern, or that could meticulously pick her way through any of the dozen disciplines the rest of the science crew had mastered singly.

The love, yes, but there was something else missing, and it was that something else that Essa needed to keep herself and the crew alive. She didn't realize it until two days after her conversation with Clea, as she climbed into the launch to look for the _Nixia_.

In the days since it had departed from the installation, Essa had been tracking it every night, noting its position, and charting its course.

It had been a week since their communications array had gone down for repairs. Essa had maintained visual contact, but since then strange things had been happening. For one, the _Nixia_ had executed another burn that left the ship streaking across the sky by several more degrees every day than expected. Essa wasn't sure what this meant, but Clea had projected a path, that showed where the _Nixia_ should be, relative to its orbital insertion. It was not there, but instead well ahead of where it should have been.

Essa put the data on a card and brought it to Clea, whom she found sitting with Orie under the lean to that they shared nearby.

"Steward," she said to Orie, "might I have a moment with our navigator?"

Orie only smiled and jumped to her feet, and with a sharp, _Aye-aye_ hurried away to see that no one was in need of food or water.

"Captain?" Clea said. "Something you need?"

Essa held out the card, and when Clea reached for it, snatched it back into the palm of her hand. "I need you to work on something. But not here."

"Where, then?" Clea said.

"I'd prefer you did it in the launch. No one can know what you're doing."

"And what am I doing?" Clea said.

"I need you to analyze what I have here. Let me know what you find."

Clea stood, and with the data card in her hand, hurried off toward the launch.

#

In the morning, Essa found her still at the console, working over the plot. She looked up and squinted in the dawn light. "Captain," she said. "I wasn't sure your data was accurate, so I've been looking for the ship myself to take my own most recent measurement."

"What have you found?"

Clea turned to the plot that drew itself on her console. She traced with her finger the path the _Nixia_ had followed since departing the installation. "Here's where they were when they left," she said, tracing a path across the board. "Under a normal, five hour burn of three-gravitations, they would have ended up here."

"What about with the new mass-transfer system?"

"I replotted it using what little data we have on that. If they'd followed that path, they should be _here_ ," she said, and tapped the console with her finger. The _Nixia_ wasn't there either. In fact, it had moved a good bit farther than on either plot.

"They executed a secondary burn two days ago," Essa said. "Does that account for the discrepancy?"

Clea nodded. "It was supposed to be a normal mid-course correction," she said, "but they didn't just alter their vector. They accelerated for nearly an hour." She showed Essa several strophes worth of code that had been forwarded directly from the ship's navigational computer. "They didn't plan it, but instead it looks like they did it on the fly."

"Do you think they were trying to avoid an obstacle?"

"There's nothing in the visible spectrum, or in infra red or short wavelengths. If there's something out there, we can't see it. But there's something else." She pointed to a readout that indicated remaining fuel stores. "At their current velocity, they won't be able to park the ship in orbit and escape again. It looks as though they're planning to slingshot back out of the gravity well."

Essa nodded and studied the plot. She knew what it meant. "We'll have one attempt at rendezvous, and only one. I've done it before." Not under these circumstances, of course, but still, she'd done it. "How long do we have?" she asked.

"A little under two days," Clea said.


	10. Chapter 10: Second Rule of Field Work

At first, the war was everywhere. In the Nubian Expanse, a group of turian supply ships had been destroyed in a raid, leaving a debris field that was hurling starward. They jettisoned their stores of torpedoes there, and moved on to find dozens of ships, some barely spaceworthy, were lined up at the relay in the Maroon Sea, ready to leave for safety. And in the Shadow Sea, a salarian battlegroup was forming up. Vance's captor, the asari named Liara T'Soni, had disabled their transponder in the hopes they could slip by unnoticed, and in fact, they passed directly through the body of the fleet as it waited its turn. Listening to the few unencrypted transmissions, it sounded as though they were on their way to Taetrus, where the turians had sustained heavy losses in a battle that had lasted for three days.

"No one wants the turians to come out on top," Liara said. "It only makes sense. The Hierarchy has the numbers." She had crawled out of her seat, and in a crouch, with her arm braced on the overhead console and her feet on the pilot's armrest, she leaned in to study Vance's expression. For the first time in a long while, after years of thinking the asari weren't so different from humans, Vance understood that she was looking at an alien, someone who was quite different from her, both in body and in understanding.

"What's wrong?" Liara asked.

Vance shook her head. Liara leaned forward and cut Vance free of the straps that held her. From the holster on her hip, she took the pistol and handed it over, grip-first. "Here she said."

"What are you doing?" Vance stared at the pistol like it were a venomous spider.

"You're in the intelligence game, aren't you?" Liara said. "Here. Take it."

Vance shook her head, but slowly reached out and took the pistol. She wondered if Liara had forgot she'd already handed over the ammunition block a few hours earlier. Liara turned her back, and almost looked as though she were about to sit down, but Vance had put the gun back together, and was holding it out, pointing it at Liara's head.

Liara turned, carefully. In the microgravity, she pushed herself back and landed softly against the back of the pilot's seat. "I see you're thinking about making a choice," she said. "Kill me. Take me captive. Turn me over to—whom do you think would pay the most for me right now?"

"I have a duty to fulfill," Vance said. "I'm not thinking about money."

"You should be," Liara said. They had reached the secondary relay by then, and she turned to the controls. "I suppose you should try to stop me from making the jump to Attican Beta, she said. But then, if you kill me, here you are deep in salarian territory, in an Alliance vessel, without armament." After a pause, she added, "Apart from that pistol."

Vance kept the weapon trained on Liara's head. Her captor appeared not to care.

"So killing me isn't an option." She punched in a code, and the relay began to turn faster. Just like that the threat board lit up, but by then, it was too late. Their ship was in the grasp of the relay now, and in an instant they were somewhere else. "We're deep in the Terminus now," Liara said. "Fat lot of good that will do you. There's nothing but turian and volus colonies nearby." She unbuckled herself again, and said, "Or you could turn the weapon the other way. In a sense it may be your best option." She crouched again on the center console, and again, her body, folded and coiled looking strange and alien, and a thousand times more dangerous than when she was in the pilot's chair. "What's your intelligence training," her captor said, her face changing instantly from open menace to curiosity.

"What do you mean?"

"Did you train to work in the field?"

"I did," Vance said. She didn't realize it, but she had lowered the pistol, and her captor had placed her oddly warm hand over her own. "But I've been an analyst for nearly ten years now."

"Then you're forgetting your training," Liara said. Gently she took the weapon, and disappeared below, to the crew area. After a moment Vance heard the waste chute cycle. Her captor returned empty handed. "There, she said. Much better."

"What did you do?" Vance asked.

"I spaced the pistol, same as I jettisoned the torpedoes."

"It doesn't seem very wise," Vance said, "going into the Traverse unarmed."

"You're forgetting the first rule of field work. Well, some say it's the second rule. Never carry a weapon. It will only encourage the people you encounter to kill you."

Vance nodded. She had heard something like that, not in those words, but the same sentiment. "What's the first rule?"

"Your body is the only weapon no one can take away from you. Master it."

Vance nodded again. She suddenly felt very ill at ease. She'd seen her captor fight. "Right," she said.

Liara patted her on the shoulder. "Get some rest," she said. "I think we'll both sleep easier now, don't you?"

Vance wasn't sure, but she said, "Yes," and went below.

#

Discovered by the turians while humans were still burning coal for power, Tortuga was an earth analogue, though covered in a global ocean nearly a hundred kilometers deep. Apart from those depths, and the vast wastes of saltwater, were two small continents, both the result of supervolcanoes that had hurled themselves upward higher than Olympus Mons on Mars. The larger of these had risen from the ocean and produced a small archipelago of atolls, the rims of its ancient caldera that had been eroded and partially drowned. The other landmass was a similar structure, only here the rim of the caldera had thus far remained intact, a protected little hole in the ocean, a circular range of mountains stood two thousand meters above the ocean, with the bottom of its caldera some four kilometers four kilometers below sea level. For now it was dry land, an inverted island. One day the sea would break through the circular wall that protected it, but for now, a city had sprung up around a freshwater lake in the haven formed by the vertical walls of the ancient volcanic mouth, and its hundred kilometer-wide valley floor.

Tamaconda, the city was called, and it was a beautiful place, and dangerous. One couldn't land there. There was too much traffic, and with no one to organize it, the risk of crashing in or near the city, where it might spill its toxic contents into the streets or the adjacent farmland was too great. Ships calling at Tamaconda had to land in the shallows of the volcano's southeastern flank, where the seafloor was less than three hundred meters deep. From there, one traveled first by submersible, then maglev into the city.

Situated at the far rim of the galaxy, nearly eighty thousand light years from the Citadel and its government, it was an ideal haven for pirates and outlaws.

#

The craft that glommed onto their airlock, and bid them board did not inspire confidence. Liara crawled through the opening first, water leaking into the interior of their ship, as she went, and Vance followed. There she met two grim-faced batarians, yellow eyed, green skinned, who stood staring at her, blinking one set of eyes, then the other.

"That one yours?" one of them said to Liara, who said, forcefully, _As much as she belongs to anyone_. Inside, the floor of the sub was damp, its floor panels and walls covered in rust, and stains. On entering, Vance saw rows of seats, where about a dozen people, asari, batarian, human, sat in two long rows of seats facing each other, each one held in place by a heavy metal bar that came down over the shoulders and locked in place between the passenger's legs. The two batarians grabbed Liara and Vance and shoved them into seats, facing each other, and clamped them down, too.

Vance fought, realizing that the others on board were likely all slaves, and she shouted that she didn't belong to anyone. The batarian who had clamped her into her seat growled, "Stop fighting, human. Rules are rules."

When they had gone, and the sub rumbled to life, Liara said to her in a low voice, "These bars keep them from trying to kill the crew."

Vance shut her eyes, and tried not to think about it. The slaves were quiet and didn't fight against the restraint, but for a young woman at the far end of Vance's row who sobbed, now loud, now quiet, as the sub's hull groaned and creaked. One of the others shouted, likely not for the first time, for her to shut up.

#

The trip lasted hours. Vance forced herself to sleep, and woke to the interior of the sub smelling like shit and piss. The hull was pitching and rolling, meaning they likely were on the surface. The human was still sobbing. Worse now. Liara seemed to be in a trance, her eyes open and calm. Soon vomit was added to the symphony of odors that filled the cramped space.

The sub lurched, and there was a terrible noise, and in an instant there was an alarm blaring that the hatch had come open. Water poured in, spill from around the seal, Vance realized, but it kept coming so that a pond began to form underneath the hatch entrance. The batarian sailors had, after picking up Liara and Vance, locked themselves behind an armored door. A loophole opened, and then a second, big enough for Vance to see the barrels of a two assault rifles poking through. One of them shouted, "Master on deck! Restraints are coming off!"

And just like that the metal bar that had kept her down released and folded up into the space behind her.

The batarian sailors shouted, "On your feet!" and everyone rose as a unit. The other passengers looked to be in terrible shape. Each was dressed in the same kind of tattered uniform, baggy gray cloth that looked to have been used over and over again. Most were filthy, and had been before they came aboard. Their condition had only been made worse by the trip underwater. Vance looked at the woman she thought she'd heard sobbing, and began to speak, but the batarians shouted, "Shut up! No talking." After a moment, the other said, "First word gets you a hot round in the knee. Now get out!"

Liara went up the ladder first, and Vance followed. They were out in the open, and it was pouring rain. The submersible they'd been in was tied up with two-dozen similar vessels, all of them in poor enough condition that Vance would have declined to board, had she first had the chance to see any of them from the outside. The one they'd been riding in was painted a flat green, and bore the symbol of a scorpion holding a diminutive human in each claw.

The next sub down was red, either from rust or a shabby coat of paint, and bore the symbol of a skull biting a fist. "Different pirate clans," Liara said. "This one's the Fortune's Fools, that one is the Devil's Hand. They're the only way in or out of Tamaconda, unfortunately."

Along the center of the pier, crates were stacked in uneven rows. About half of the crates were open metal cages, some empty, others holding four or five captives, exposed to the elements. Automated loaders, themselves in poor condition, hovered up and down the pier, picking up crates and cages and shuttling them here and there.

Six batarians, each armed with shock sticks and sidearms stood waiting with a series of empty cages behind them. They pointed at Liara and Vance, growling when he saw she had no collar. "Too bad," he said with what looked like the batarian version of a smile. "Blue meat fetches the best price." Seeing Vance, he added, I'd even throw in the one-eared human for an extra ten."

Liara whispered, "Let it go. If you touch him, he'll put you in a cage and sell you like the rest. We have to be careful here. Offend one of the clans, and even a freeman can end up in there."

Vance zipped her uniform up to her throat, and hurried after Liara. "The other passengers," she said. "Where do they come from?"

"Here and there," Liara said. "The Devil's Hand likes to take their captives in interstellar space. Fortune's Fools prefer to raid colony worlds. Take your pick."

"What's going to happen to them?" Vance said.

"The new slave market is on the plateau up there," Liara said. "Try not to think about it. The maglev is this way."

#

The train was no cleaner or more pleasant than the sub. It groaned and creaked under the strain of climbing the rim of the caldera, and then descending again. From on high, the sea stretched out in every direction, and the rain that had been falling on the pier had long since moved out over the water, where the waves churned and swirled. Light broke through the clouds and fell in thick shafts on the blue water, and then looking down from the rim of the caldera into the crater, down the vertical wall onto the fields and farmland, and the little city by the lake, it seemed like a beautiful place.

Even in the old slave market, where the train deposited them an hour later, was warm and pleasant, with palm trees swaying in a gentle breeze, and old sail boats tacking against the wind.

The Old Market would have been quaint, an old square, cobbled, and surrounded by low wooden and stucco buildings painted a variety of colors, it looked like something from long ago on Earth. In a sense it was modeled after warm climate settlements that had once existed there. But even here, the calm was pierced by shouting, cries for help, and occasionally the sound of distant gunfire.

"Who keeps the peace here?" Vance asked.

"Nobody. The clans don't officially fight each other here, for what it's worth. All grudges on Tortuga are personal." Liara was moving toward one of the streets that led out of the square. "Be careful," she said. "One of my friends was taken here." They hurried away from a trio of krogan, who had been shoving everyone out of their way as they crossed in the opposite direction. Here the street led up, toward the top of a low hill, and then bent again, into a shabby neighborhood of low buildings, some old prefab, some newer and made of stone. From there, half dozen or more alleyways led off into the shadows. Liara led the way down and then stopped at the mouth of an alley and looked in. "It happened right here, in fact."

"What happened?"

"She was taken," Liara said. "I looked for her for ten years, but never got close. She might have ended up like those people on the docks." After a pause, she added, "I prefer to assume she was murdered. No body, but still, better than a life of captivity, especially for someone as pretty as she was."

"When was this?"

"Before your time," Liara said. "Eighty-three years ago, in fact. Have you ever heard of Miranda Lawson?"

"I know the name," Vance said. "She was Cerberus, wasn't she?"

"For a time," Liara said. "I never quite trusted her, but during the war I saw a different side of her."

"Do you think Cerberus came after her?"

"It was never clear who," Liara said. "The conventional wisdom was that Cerberus was effectively destroyed during the Reaper Invasion. Some survived, though. Not their command structure, but the idea they embodied." Liara was examining a spot on the wall, about waist high on the moss-crusted wall. "Whoever did it, wanted me to think it was one of the clans. But they had no reason, apart from money, and no one ever asked for a ransom."

"Why here?"

"Miranda had contacts here in Tamaconda, and in Port Verdant to the east. But this time she said she had something for me."

"What was it?"

"I don't know. I was on my way here when she disappeared." Liara was scraping at something on the wall. "From what I understand, she found out she was being followed, ducked in here, and then was taken—" she pointed down the alley "—about a dozen meters that way. Women like Miranda, like me, probably like you, we shouldn't expect to die peacefully in our sleep." Liara ran her hand over another section of the wall. What she might have been looking for, Vance couldn't tell, but she began looking, too, just for something to do. All of a sudden, Liara whispered, "There!" and bent down. She scraped away some of the moss, where a series of lines had been scratched into the soft stone.

Vance bent down to look. "That looks like a map."

"That's because it is," Liara said. "Whatever she left for me, it's not far from here." Liara turned and moved out of the alley. Where the passageway met the street, she stopped and looked out for a moment before retreating immediately back into the shadows. "It appears that we have picked up some friends." She made a fist and it glowed blue. "It's time I showed you about the second rule of field work."


	11. Chapter 11: Escape Velocity

Escape Velocity

In the telescope, the _Nixia_ had grown from a tiny speck, a single pixel of dim gray against the dark black of space, into an object whose outline was almost legible in the viewfinder. There was the yellow station light, and the blue one just visible on the far side. Two or three pixels of dim red represented the viewports of the command deck. And behind them small cylinders that made up the crew, science and engineering decks lay dwarfed by massive spheres clad in white ceramic tiles that held their fuel reserves. In less than six hours, Essa would be aboard again, captain of her ship once more, or she would be hurtling out into the void of interplanetary space. The navigator who was working with her said they stood a good chance of making it. Ninety-seven percent. But there was one problem that still needed to be resolved.

Essa climbed down out of the launch and into the tall grass. At one edge of the forest lay their encampment, where a bonfire was continually burning. From the other edge of the clearing, about three kilometers distant, there came a whistling hoot, like a bird maybe. It wasn't a bird, though. It was one of those creatures, hideous as a monster, but perhaps not so monstrous after all. She had killed a number of them a fortnight ago, and wrecked the launch in the process, forcing she and her crew to make hasty repairs and modifications, that now led to this last decision.

Damaged as it was, the launch could still easily reach low planetary orbit. But something had happened to the _Nixia_ , an emergency vent of one of their four main fuel tanks had left them with only enough fuel for a single pass, not orbital insertion and then return to escape velocity. The launch would need to be traveling at escape velocity in order to rendezvous, and that meant that, even after they had dumped all but the most necessary gear, and even some of the food, even after they had removed all dead weight that would never be used again, including most of the heat shield, there wouldn't be enough lift capacity to carry all of them back to the ship. Out of the twenty-three who had landed on this goddessforsaken planet, and of the seventeen who were still alive, only twelve could return to the _Nixia_. Five more would remain stranded indefinitely, probably for the rest of their lives, on a planet that was already inhabited by a species of intelligent and hostile animals.

Essa looked across the clearing at the bonfire, and then in the other direction. There came another hoot, and this time it was answered by a chorus of voices. Were they preparing another attack? If they did, the mission was finished. She balled her fists and then checked her watch: five hours and twenty-three minutes. On this planet that meant one more sunset, and about half a night. They had to hold out that long.

Turning back to the bonfire, she saw figures moving across the pink-red light. They were waiting. She put her head down, put on her captain's face and strode through the tall grass to meet them.

Nerai was waiting for her at the edge of the camp. Her child, now nearly three, clung to her hip. She was out of uniform, having tanned some of the creatures' hides and turned their shaggy white pelts into a shift and leggings. Her daughter wore similar clothes. "Captain," she said. Something was on her mind. "Have you given any more thought to my proposal?"

"Huntress," Essa said. She would have said more, but Orie approached from by the fire.

"Captain," she said, "we are ready for you."

Essa found the rest of the crew arranged in a semicircle. At one end stood Commandant Razia, head of the detachment of commandos who had come with them. Beside her was Liss. Orie took her place at the other end, leaving the rest of the crew, science officers and technicians, none of them suited to the way the had spent their last three years, scraping their living out of the forest as best they could. Essa surveyed their faces. Razia and Liss both looked weary, but ready. Orie terrified. The rest of them appeared to be somewhere between defeated and broken. None of them met her gaze. Nerai approached with her daughter.

"Captain," she said again. "Before you do this at least consider my offer."

"I have, Huntress," Essa said. She examined her crew again, and then began to speak. "Twenty-three of us landed here three years ago. Sixteen of now stand before me. We have left the bones and ashes of our friends, and of our—" her voice caught "—our beloved here. But I am afraid we shall have to leave a few more behind. Five of you must stay. You have all worked to make our launch as ready to fly as possible, and you have all worked with the hope of returning once more to Thessia. I cannot ask you to sacrifice that hope—"

"Captain," Nerai said again. "I must—"

"I will _not_ ask anyone to volunteer to remain, but in accordance with the law, I will ask you to draw your own fate." Essa produced a bag she had fashioned out of a scrap of tarpaulin. "Inside are metal bearings, each identical, but for their color. Blue lots give you a space on the launch. Red lots will remain. May the goddess smile upon you." She held up the bag, and bid the first crew member come forward. She drew her bearing and returned to her place, the marble sized bit of metal hidden in her hand. "Show us," Essa said. The crew member opened her fist to show a blue bearing. A murmur went through the rest of the crew. Essa watched them counting.

"Captain," Nerai said again. "I must insist."

Essa turned to Nerai. "Your opinion is noted," she said, "But I will not leave you here. Not with a child so young." Nerai shook her head and stormed off. Essa held out the bag once more. The next crew member came forward, took her bearing and returned to her spot. Blue again. Two more times with the bag, two more blues. Only five spots remaining now, one belonged to Essa herself, given that she was the only one who could fly the launch. So far, one from engineering, one from the science deck, Razia and one of the other commandos had drawn seats on the launch. Liss was next. Hers was red. As was the next, for one of the science officers.

Orie had slowly begun crumpling in on herself as the process had dragged on. Two days earlier she'd told the captain the same thing as Nerai, that she would stay, in the hopes of some day being rescued. That was not how things were done, Essa had told her. The choice must be left up to the Goddess.

Essa wondered why she was bothering with the formality, though, except that it was required by asari maritime law. It wasn't, she reasoned, likely she would ever face an inquiry, she thought now, as one crew member drew another red bearing, and her companion yet another—not because she was blameless. Far from it, but because she knew the likelihood of surviving even the next stage of their journey was incredibly unlikely.

Now. There were two bearings left in the bag. One red, one blue. Nerai had drawn a blue bearing for herself and her daughter, and now stood apart from the rest, looking furious. The crew who had drawn red, Essa saw, were not the fittest to survive for an extended period in the wilderness. An engineer, two scientists, and one huntress. They faced long odds.

The last two came forward to either receive their clearance to leave, or their orders to remain behind. Orie and Mennia, the final tech. Orie's hand trembled as it went into the bag, and she spent a good long while feeling each bearing, as though that would tell her which to choose. Essa kept her eyes steadfastly ahead of her, while the steward hesitated, and then finally drew out her lot. Red.

Mennia looked relieved, then as though she were about to be sick. Essa put down the bag and turned to the crew.

"The lots have been drawn," she said. The crew members who had drawn red had all gathered together, a little closer to the fire. "Fate has decided, but the orders are mine to give. If you have drawn a red lot, you will remain here to await rescue. I know that hard years await, and for that I am sorry, but we shall unlock the mystery of these installations and return to find you. That I promise. May the goddess be with you." She took a breath and clasped her hands behind her back. "All other crew are to say your farewells, and muster at the launch in one hour. Fall out."

Essa made her way through the camp. The commandos had foreseen the reality that lay ahead, and spent what time they could fashioning weapons and tools, and rigging a defensive perimeter around the rough shelters, one or two still patched together with old tarpaulins, most made of thatch. The fire was burning well, but fuel to keep it going for any length of time would be hard to sustain. Perhaps with fewer mouths to feed—but then, fewer arms to defend, as well, and only one huntress.

Essa found Orie, who was taking the news especially hard, crouched down at the tree line, holding her stomach. Seeing Essa, she stood, but looked only at the dirt in front of her feet.

"Captain," she said.

"Steward," Essa answered. She searched for something encouraging to say, but found only this: "I hate to leave you here, but safety is no more assured aboard the ship."

Orie was quite for a long time. At last she said, "Thank you. I wanted you to know that I've got family in Tenaris. If you get home before me, will you—" she stopped herself and then tried to go on. "Would you find them and tell them what happened to us? I mean, out here?" She gestured up at the stars, which were now just coming into view beyond the smoke of the bonfire. "Will you tell them for me?"

Essa nodded. She took Orie's hands in hers. Under normal circumstances she never would have allowed herself such familiarity with the crew, but this was an exceptional evening. "Orie," she said. Her voice was gentle, "Show them to me."

Orie nodded and stepped closer to place her forehead against her captain's. In an instant they were somewhere else, a group of asari were seated around a shared hearth, at one time a communal place, in farming communities they were nearly as important the well, and just as busy with activity. No longer strictly necessary, in modern times they remained an important place for gatherings. Looking through Orie's eyes, she saw several bondmates warming themselves at was Orie's mother, dressed in the orange coverall worn by mechanics all over Thessia. She had a gap between her front teeth, and eyes that were an unusual shade of green. She spoke with a lisp. When she laughed, she clapped her hands, and in this particular memory, was dancing with four or five others. And there was Orie and one of her many aunts. She was only a few years old, and dressed in a coverall like her mother's, part of a toy set that came with little wrenches and drills that clipped to a belt. The temple of Athame rose in the background, but no one paid it much attention, even when the bells rang for evening.

It was wonderful, and Essa said so.

"Tell her about me, and all I did out here," Orie said. "She'll be happy to know. I know she will."

Then there was a flash of light, and the memory receded, and Essa and Orie were drifting in the calm, blue dark of their shared minds, a wonderful place to linger, but there simply wasn't time, and Orie knew it. She broke contact a little before Essa did, and the change in state left her feeling ill at ease.

Meanwhile the departing crew had gathered at the bottom of the ramp to the launch. Those who would be left behind, had arranged themselves to watch. Essa approached the crew and studied them, and it was only after having counted them twice that she realize that Nerai wasn't there.

She wheeled around, and looked behind her, only to spot her standing with the others. She had lifted her child up onto her shoulders. Essa checked the time. They would need to be underway in less than fifteen minutes. Nerai had made sure to orchestrate it this way, to avoid a lengthy conversation. All the same, Essa ran to where she was standing.

"You're disobeying a direct order, Huntress."

"I'm not under your chain of command," Nerai said.

"Did Razia order you to remain?"

Nerai shook her head. She gestured at her daughter, and said, "I only take orders from her now." After a moment she added, "Pray come back for us. In the meantime, though, I'll look out for this lot, and you look out for them. Good?"

Essa nodded. She had to go. She and Nerai shook hands, and then separated, one toward camp, one toward the launch.

#

Essa ran through her final preflight checks, while the navigator, who was presently her acting XO, saw to securing the remainder of the passengers. The copilot's viewport had a crack in it that they'd covered with an adhesive mesh that would probably hold once they were in the hard vacuum of space. Probably. Everyone was wearing EVA suits just to be sure, though there weren't enough to go around, so Commandant Razia had decided to forgo hers.

The _Nixia_ 's locator beacon was still pinging, good and strong, and was now only sixty-two minutes out. Essa had trained on maneuvers like this hundreds of times in the simulator, and done more than her share in real life. Only in all those cases, she had solid ground beneath her, or just a short distance away. In this case, the escape burn would expending nearly all of their fuel reserves. Not that it mattered. The heat shield was gone anyhow. Either this would work, or it wouldn't. She focused on the switches and dials in front of her. At least she could control them.

And then the last switch was done. She radioed the _Nixia_ as she completed the main engine start sequence. The launch rose from its makeshift cradle. Essa pulled the lever that jettisoned the landing struts, then angled the ship upward. As she went, she rolled the launch onto its back, circling once over the camp at about a thousand meters, before she turned again, over a low mountain range, then passing over a narrow sea, before finally breaking through a dense layer of clouds near the dawn side of the planet. Atmospheric resistance dwindled. The viewport made an odd pop, but if anything there was only a slow leak. It only needed to hold for a little while longer.

The planet dropped away, and the ship came into view. A speck, but much larger on the telescopic eye. Now she could see what looked like figures in the cockpit. The ship was rolled on its back relative to them, and Essa took note of this as she planned her approach.

The launch's tracking beacon made contact with the _Nixia_ again, and everything seemed to be going well, in spite of not receiving answers to the navigator's hails.

"Why aren't they answering?"

"We'll ask them when we see them," Essa said.

The rest of the maneuver went smoothly. In ten minutes they had pulled alongside the ship. Essa did a slow pass of the exterior. The crew's earlier report was true. One of their main fuel cells had ruptured, a small meteoroid impact, by the look of it, that had smashed right through the shielding and burst a hole big enough to crawl through in the upper quadrant of the vessel. It was a miracle that there hadn't been more damage. The rest of the ship looked to be intact. All the lights were working, and the main and secondary airlocks were all in good condition. The flight deck still wasn't responding to hails.

"Their comms seem to be working," the navigator said. "I have tone on all major and backup frequencies. They're just not using them."

"Let's find out what's going on."

Essa coupled the launch to the ship's main airlock, and began powering it down. The passengers unstrapped. Some of them gasped when they were set free of their harness. After three years on solid ground, they had lost their feeling for weightlessness. One of them vomited, while Razia worked the airlock.

Perhaps that was why Essa didn't notice anything amiss until the navigator came to fetch her.

"Captain," you need to come right away.

"What is it?"

The navigator didn't speak, but only took Essa's arm. Essa allowed herself to be dragged out of her restraints and through the airlock. It was then that she noticed the smell.

All long-endurance space vessels have a certain smell. So many bodies, with so little opportunity to wash, the scents of work, of cooking, of digestion, all the other smells associated with being alive, mixed together to produce an odor that often made the uninitiated recoil. Entering the _Nixia_ was different. The pungent stink of life was gone, and in its place was the fungal, odor of death. Essa covered her mouth and nearly vomited. After a moment, in the companionway to the flight deck, her mind somehow took control of her stomach, and forced the urge away. "What happened?" she said.

The navigator only covered her face with her hands, and gestured. As Essa emerged onto the flight deck, she saw first her XO, two navigators, and a comms operator, buckled into their seats. By the look of it, they'd been dead for a long time.

"They're all like this," the navigator said. "The entire crew is dead."


	12. Chapter 12: Ancon

Beyond the slum was a quiet lakeside neighborhood. Liara had described it to her, before they'd split up. Vance was to go there and find her, once the danger had passed them by. _Beyond the slum,_ Liara had told her, _you'll come to narrow arroyo. On the other side, you'll find a neighborhood that fronts onto the lake._ Liara had warned her about going near the lakeshore, but had instead advised her to hang back, find a red house with a big garden that faces a quiet street. We'll find a friend there.

Vance had found the arroyo just fine, and with a little luck she'd left the men who had been chasing her well behind, or so she'd thought, until at a junction between two alleyways, she and one of her pursuers had nearly crashed into each other. She'd reached for his weapon, just as he'd tried to raise its against her, and there had been a struggle over the rifle that Vance might have won, if the man hadn't pulled the trigger.

Vance had left part of her left palm on the hot metal, but it was likely that her right elbow had broken the man's jaw. An even trade, she thought, but the gunfire had drawn the others in her direction.

The slum ran right up to the edge of the arroyo. The slumside bank had burned in the last few years, stripping it bare of all but weeds and patches of grass. The rest was strewn with garbage, and debris from a few houses that had collapsed as the bank widened over time. At the bottom, a slow-moving thread of green water tumbled over loose rocks. Up above, on the far bank, trees and tall grass grew in abundance, and provided better concealment, if not cover, from her pursuers. Something whizzed past her head, a bug or a bullet. Whatever it was Vance kept moving.

She had to climb a tree to get out of the canyon. Over the edge, and back onto level ground again, she found herself in an open area. A vacant lot, that had grown up around the hulk of an ancient human freighter that had crash landed here. _Use it as a landmark_ , Liara had told her, _but stay away. Too much open ground_.

Easily said, harder to do when you walked right up on it. There was almost no cover beyond the edge of the canyon, apart from a mound of red earth, and a few tufts of waist high grass. Beyond that, fifty meters of more red dirt, packed hard, and rutted by decades of rainfall. The ship would provide good cover, but beyond it, was another hundred meters or more of open ground. Just above the ship's drive cone, Vance saw the name of the ship, _Ancon_ , on one of the few ceramic panels that had not been looted from the ship's outer skin.

She remembered the story of the _Ancon_. Spacefaring had always been a dangerous, lonely business. But the _Ancon_ was a bit of a special case, in that it had disappeared from orbit over Mars, after having dropped off its load of supplies at the Schiaparelli base. Schiaparelli was a secondary prothean site that had only recently been unearthed. Vance had followed the news as a young girl along with her older sister. They'd had an entire wall of their cubicle inside the housing allotment devoted to the newest discoveries—even if most of them weren't necessarily technologically significant. Then the _Ancon_ had vanished, no debris, no cryptic transmissions. Just one day, it was departing Mars orbit, and the next it had not failed to call at Benning, where it was supposed to begin its next run.

The extranet had abounded with conspiracy theories, of course. The most enduring one was that the ship had been carrying some sort of top secret artifact, a beacon or maybe a new type of unstable power source that was to be studied at a black site. Even Vance and her sister, Alyssa, had been quite taken with the idea for a time. But none of the stories ever made sense. The Schiaparelli base was already under Alliance control, and Mars remained largely uninhabited. Anything they'd found, even something hazardous, could just as easily have been studied onsite. Or simply moved a few hundred kilometers away, to a new section of the sandy waste that was Mars. A competing idea was that the freighter had collided with a stray bit of debris from the Shield cloud, the orbiting debris field left behind after the combined fleets had met the full reaper strength over earth. But even, then, it didn't really make sense. The Shield Cloud had a predictable orbital period—every April, its orbit crossed that of the Earth, and most of the field was well inside Mars orbit.

The third, and possibly the most frightening, and subsequently the theory that had caused the greatest amount of Alliance activity in the Sol system, was the possibility that the ship had been taken by force somewhere in transit between Mars and the Charon relay. The idea that pirates were operating within the heart of Alliance territory had been enough to guarantee that Vance would apply for officer candidate school on her eighteenth birthday, and that her sister, too frightened to join, would never leave the surface of the planet where she had been born.

Seeing the _Ancon_ , perched on two of its landing skids, both of them partially crumpled and its spars bent and cracked amidships, made Vance stop dead in her tracks. It might have been that moment of hesitation that saved her life, as one of her pursuers emerged from the brush, about ten meters to her right. Almost immediately he began to trot across the red dirt, his rifle aimed at the far end of the clearing. He'd crossed about half the distance to the ship, when she fell upon him, kicking his right knee out and wrapping her arm around his neck. The man grunted and struggled, his hands letting go of the rifle to claw at her arms and face, but she held on. In another instant he was unconscious. She held on, still, and shuffled her feet to drag him toward the shadows where the _Ancon_ had crumpled into the dirt. He fought her, fingernails clawing into the flesh of her forearms, but then perhaps realizing he couldn't get free, he whispered, _No...wait—_

By the time she'd reached the ship, the man was probably dead, but from concealment, she counted to thirty, while her arms stayed clamped down on his throat. Best to be sure, her instructors had told her. When she finally dropped him, she was panting and dizzy, nearly on the point of passing out from the effort.

One last look at the man. One eye was open, its pupil so dilated it was nearly black, the sclera a pink blur of burst blood vessels, the other was nearly closed, his mouth slack, a terrifying little void of black beyond his lips. Vance scanned the edge of the arroyo for more pursuers, and realized the rifle lay where he'd dropped it. Vance hesitated, wondering if she should sprint to grab it, or leave, when a bullet struck the metal directly in front of her. She fell onto her back and scrambled away, pushing with her legs and feet, until she had become entangled in the dead man's limbs. Still she pushed, finally rolling over as another burst of rounds struck the dirt beside her.

Vance ran. She'd killed one of them. It wouldn't stop the others from coming. Maybe it would only make them angry. She ran left as she passed the hulk of the freighter, trying to keep it between her and the shooter for as long as she could. There were still nearly a hundred meters of open ground to cover, and beyond that the path was uncertain. Up ahead, the nearest way out might be blocked by a wall made of scrap metal.

Her burned hand throbbed and bled. She wasn't getting enough air. More shots whipped past. One burst a fist-sized hole in the wall of the building in front of her. She ran right now. More ground to cover but would throw off her attacker's aim. Another shot, and she turned again, and again, until she'd reached the fence, just high enough that she would need to clamber over it. Which she did. As she went over, she saw a turian aiming his rifle at her and then a hand grabbed her shoulder and pulled her over the edge of the fence into the dark alleyway behind. Bullets raked the top of the fence.

The hand was still on her shoulder. Someone was shouting, and there was more shooting, this time from a nearby window. Quietly someone said, "They're down." Liara helped Vance to her feet, and the two of them followed the alley into a market square that had grown up around a small inlet from the lake that filled the center of the caldera.

"We're safer here," Liara said. "This area is controlled by the Hound's Children."

"Doesn't sound safe," Vance said. They walked in silence for a moment, then Vance stopped and pretended to examine an array of fruit, piled high on a cart at the edge of the market. "The ship—" she began. "Have you heard of the _Ancon_?"

"Enough to know the rumors on the extranet are mostly false."

"Nothing to do with stolen prothean artifacts, then?"

"Oh, no," Liara said. "That part is entirely true. I arranged the theft myself."

"But what about the crew?"

"It was _my_ crew," Liara said. "When I say I made all the arrangements, I mean just that."

"And where are the artifacts?"

"Here and there," Liara said. Vance shook her head. "This way," Liara whispered. Taking Vance by the elbow, she directed her companion toward an open doorway, and then into the dark within. Inside was a krogan, so big he nearly filled the entire room they'd entered. Without a word, he searched them for weapons, and pulling a length of scrap metal that could have been used as a knife from Liara's waistband. "I'll keep this here for you," he said, folding the makeshift blade in half and tossing it into a bin.

"She's inside," the krogan said, and stepped out of the way. "Good to see you again, Liara." Vance made to follow, but the krogan stopped her. "Not you."

"Come on, Kadkech," Liara said. "She's with me. I'll vouch for her."

"Your funeral," Kadkech said.

Vance followed Liara through a doorway, past rooms where bodies lay draped out on couches, as though sleeping, though some were swaying their arms to and fro, as though conducting music that only they could hear. Down a flight of stairs they came to another doorway, and here a young woman holding some kind of fighting stick stood aside to let them pass. Beyond the threshold was a parlor, of sorts, with ancient furniture from earth arranged around an elaborate rug and low table. The room overlooked the lake, but most of its windows were shuttered, the slats only partially open, leaving the figure who stood opposite them hidden in shadow.

"How did you know to find me here?" the voice asked. It was a human, a woman, Vance realized, and likely earthborn.

"I had a suspicion that Ilium would turn its back on you," Liara said. "The way it did me." She touched one of the long sofas. "Your grandfather's furniture?" Liara asked. "He was a collector, was he not?"

The woman nodded. She stepped forward, into a shaft of light. Dark hair, blue eyes, dressed in a close-fitting, formal outfit with soft-soled boots made for moving fast and quiet. She placed her hand on the back of one the couches, and bid the two of them sit.

"You'll forgive me for the dust," the woman said. "We've only just arrived."

A servant brought in a tray with tea. Watching her go, Vance wondered if the little stoop-shouldered woman was a slave, like the ones she'd seen on the pier.

"You don't mean to stay permanently, do you Kiera?"

"No, just until this whole thing with Deniri blows over. Not that I'm stupid enough to think I'm beyond her grasp, even here." The woman, Kiera, had seated herself across from them, and now, placing her forearms on her knees and leaning forward, she said, "Tell me what you know. I'll see if I can fill in the gaps."

Liara began, "About ten years ago, Deniri summoned me to the Citadel. They were tearing down some old buildings on Tayseri Ward, and happened to come across a data cache that my mother had left behind. It had been tampered with, of course Deniri's scarcely even tried to hide that from me, but still I looked. And it led me to an old asari colony world, not so far from here." Liara went on, telling this woman everything, about the turian intelligence officer, Varian, she'd collected on Omega, and about the wounded quarian they'd saved, about the human colony world called Pirin, and more files that Benezia had stashed all over the galaxy, including one in an old prothean colony that had somehow survived the initial reaper invasion, about Aria and about Afterlife, and the death of the rest of her team, and about the years she had spent, hiding in plain sight, fighting with different operations as a mercenary grunt, here and there, across the Traverse.

"And your friend?" Kiera asked.

"A hostage, and now an ally. I took her off a human carrier, after they'd tried to interrogate me." Liara paused to sip her tea. "Now, what do you know?"

Kiera seemed to weigh her answer carefully before she answered. "There's a war on. It's bad, and it's everywhere. The entire council is at each other's throats. The entire citadel government has fallen apart, as far as we can tell, asari fighting humans, humans fighting turians, turians fighting salarians. It's been brewing since I was born, but now everyone got the spark they wanted."

"The fall of Pirin was all it took," Liara said. "It's excellent for Deniri, because it makes her appear innocent"

"And, of course, to top it all off, all the council races are hunting everywhere for the leviathan. They all think they've broken the Dekkuna accords, in the midst of everything."

"They're a distraction in all this," Liara said. "Deniri wanted a war, and now she has it."

"Over what, though?"

Liara shook her head. "I was hoping you could help with that." She put down her cup and leaned forward. "The last time I spoke to your mother, she was here. She said she had something for me, but disappeared before I could find her."

"That was before my time."

"She told me so much about you, your mother."

"She'd been gone for half a century before I was even born."

"Yes, but you'd already been conceived," Liara said. "In a sense that was part of her plan. Miranda wanted you to have a chance at a clean life, clear of all the people like—"

"Like you? Yes, I suspect that that's the case." Kiera shook her head. "Still. It would have been nice to know her. She was my mother, after all, even if I was grown in a tank." After a pause, she rose and said, "Come. Let's get you cleaned up." A servant led them into adjoining rooms, where she told Vance and Liara to wash. By the time they were done, fresh clothing was laid out for each of them. When they were dressed once more, Kiera came to find them. "I have something to show you," she said.

She led them out of the parlor, and into a study. Against one wall, biometric storage boxes were stacked floor to ceiling, the other wall was a giant picture window looking out over the lake. In the center of the room stood an old wooden desk. Kiera pulled out the center drawer and flipped it over on top of the desk.

Vance stepped closer to have a look, but didn't see anything. Liara pulled out her omnitool and played the ultraviolet beam across the ancient wood. A set of flickering numbers‚— _303—_ appeared in the beam, as the light hit them.

Liara touched the numbers, and then felt around with her fingertips, until something—a bit of transparent film came away into her hand.

"The desk arrived at Ilium a few weeks after she disappeared. The story was always that she'd come here to buy it. I never noticed the numbers until about a year ago."

"Did your mother write this?" Liara asked.

Kiera shook her head. "I never knew. She must have though—" she gestured toward what Liara had in her hand "—perhaps that might tell you."

"Let's have a look," Liara said. But _having a look_ took some doing. The transparent foil contained a decryption key, and an extranet address that linked to a number of small files embedded in an otherwise innocuous-looking site. What were they seeing though? The first ten or so pages were all reports from the front lines of the reaper invasion, all but one of them produced by field commanders who hadn't lived long enough to file the data themselves. They were chilling, Vance thought, the stories of desperate fighting and sacrifice, all just to hold on long enough to evacuate one or two more civilians, most of whom wouldn't survive any longer than the soldiers who were helping them. There were a hundred more, each one worse than one before it. Until Vance came across something entirely different, a strange looking photograph embedded in the middle of one of the reports. On closer examination, it wasn't a photograph at all, but a mosaic of black and white dots, arranged to form a coded message.

"Look at this," she said to Liara, handing over the data pad. "I think this is a message."

Liara held up the image. "So it is." They studied the image for a long time. The image was composed of dots of varying size, and from that they deduced there was a code. Liara ran it through a half a dozen programs before she began to see the system. "Grid coordinates," she said, after a time, "Most of the data is junk, meant to throw someone off, but—" she paused to highlight a string of digits near the bottom left corner, "—these map to a place that I know. It's an old Blue Suns mercenary base on Korlus. The asari military had set up a listening post there centuries earlier, before they turned the place into a ship breaking ground."

Soon enough, Liara and Kiera were poring over a holographic display of the planet, pinpointing the location's exact coordinates. "Does it match?" Kiera was asking.

"It's close. Not perfect. We will have our work cut out for us, that's for sure." She got up and went over to the windows, open now. The sun had long ago set over the edge fo the volcano's rim, but far above on the peaks, light still flared on the long tails of snow that blew eastward on the storm winds. She went out onto the terrace, and Vance made to follow her, but Kiera stopped her.

"Let her go," she said. "She needs to think."

But Vance was feeling nervous. The morning that began in danger, followed by a peaceful afternoon of tea and cakes and gossip between veteran intelligence professionals. It didn't quite fit, like someone had let them slip away, and were now closing in again. _You get a feeling_ , her training officer had told her, _you damn well better listen to it. Walk away, even if it means giving up on a potentially big win._ Kiera seemed to understand what Vance was thinking.

"Palmyra," she said. "What's eating you?"

Vance shook her head. "Have you ever killed anyone?"

Kiera smiled. "No," she said. It was a lie.

"I choked a man to death this morning," she said. "It wasn't what I thought it would be."

Kiera was quiet. For all Vance knew, those could have been men that she'd sent. You can't really trust anyone, after all. They could have been sent just to push Vance and Liara in Kiera's direction. There was a breath of wind that stirred the trees all along the lakeshore. All along the water it was black as night, with lights coming on in the homes all along the water, and on boats that lay at anchor a few hundred meters offshore.

Vance stepped outside. "Liara," she said. "We should get some rest. We've a long way to go to get to Korlus."

Liara seemed to wake from a dream. Her body shivered, and she stepped away from the stone balustrade. Vance went out to meet her halfway, and Kiera hurried out with them too. The three met in the middle of the terrace and then they all had begun to turn. Just then, the wind died, and all was still, impossibly quiet. Then waves were lapping against the shore, and the wind was again in the trees. A hydrofoil raced along, far out on the horizon. None of them heard the shot.

Not until Kiera slumped to her knees. The projectile had taken her just below the shoulder, and taken off her arm so that it dangled by little more than a thread of skin and flesh. There was a second shot as they dragged her inside and threw her down on the couch, but Liara had put up a barrier, and it glanced off into the night. A medical drone came to work on Kiera's arm almost as soon as they were inside, while Vance put out the lights and scanned for the sniper. Another bullet struck nearby. Whoever it was shooting wasn't experienced enough to pull off a shot from this far away, or—or perhaps—Vance looked up and saw the hydrofoil that had been far out had turned and was now racing hard across the water straight at Kiera's compound, firing rockets as it came. The first two missed high, and struck one of the upper levels of the building. Everything shook, and the power went off.

Liara was standing over Kiera as the drone worked, muttering, _no, no, no_ , and then something about the wind, that it wasn't her fault, Kiera, it had been the wind, otherwise it would be _me_ , lying in _your_ place.

"We've got to get you out of here," Liara was saying now, and Kiera had her hand on Liara's face, and was saying something about an escape plan. A way out. "Not far," Kiera said. "Through the passageway to your right, and down the stairs."

Kiera's hand dropped from Liara's face. When she spoke her voice was only a whisper. "Go," she said. Her skin was already white and it had the slack, clammy look of someone who had already bled out. She was dead, her heart just didn't know it yet, and so it kept pumping.

"We have to go," Vance said. Liara lingered.

She rose just as a rocket passed directly over them and burst in one of the upper floors. Kiera's people had taken up positions in the windows and were returning fire now, but there was the sound of small arms from the street, too. Her men couldn't fight in every direction, what few of them there must have been.

Vance grabbed Liara, and pulled her into the corridor. They found the stairs and ran down and down while the building shook with more rocket strikes, until they came to a blast door, made of concrete and steel. Liara spun the crank and hauled it open, and the two of them pulled it shut once they were both through. Inside, blue light reflected off walls that had been painted yellow, giving everything a greenish cast. The room stretched out long in front of them, a number beds, stacked like shelves, and the beds themselves stacked with supplies. Liara shone a light toward the far end of the room, where the corridor dead ended against a blank wall. Electronics stood stacked nearby, but none of it looked useful. There were weapons, too, none brand new, but all well kept, and ready for use, what little the two of them could do to fight off what might very well be a company-strength unit, deploying this very second from the hydrofoil.

"You're hurt," Liara said. Vance looked down. There was blood all over the blue tunic that Kiera had given them just hours earlier, though she hadn't felt anything at the time. Now there was an odd burning sensation in her cheek and chin. "Here," Liara said. She pressed the locking mechanism on the bunker door before overloading the panel with her omnitool. She produced a medkit from one of the shelves and plucked a fragment of bone from Vance's chin. And another from her cheek. The wounds didn't bother her, but the bone made her think of the man she'd killed, and Vance suddenly collapsed to her knees to vomit. Liara waited patiently, even handed Vance a bottle of water from the stash they'd found. But at last she said, "Listen, they'll already have found the door." It was quiet outside, but that didn't mean anything. The building shook again, but that was far away. "In ten minutes they'll be here with a frame charge to blow it open. Likely they won't even need to kill us. The blast alone in this tiny compartment turn our bodies to jelly. We need to get out of here."

Vance collected herself. "How?"

"We look for a way out," Liara said. "We're still alive. I aim to stay that way." The look in her eye was wild, and, not for the first time, Vance realized she was locked in a small room with a dangerous alien, one who could crush her with little more than a thought.

They began by examining the far wall, then the floor, pulling up the mats that covered the bare concrete, then by shoving aside anything that wasn't bolted to the floor. Outside there was the distinct sound of someone pounding on the concrete. "There they are," Liara said. "Five minutes before they blow the door."

Vance grabbed a pistol and readied it, just in case. Then she had a thought. Searching through the supplies, she found something that looked like it would burn. With Liara's omnitool, they set it on fire. A current of air pulled the smoke under one of the rows of beds. "There," she said. Liara grabbed the stack of beds with her biotics and ripped them from the floor. Another moment of concentration and she had heaved them clean across the room. She fell to her knees. At first Vance thought she was looking for the way out, but soon realized that Liara was dazed. Outside, there was the howl of a drill. They were already screwing the frame charges in place.

Vance felt around on the floor. There was a clear seam at the base of the wall, and after a minute of hunting, she found a cavity. When she shoved her finger inside, there was a mechanical button that released a heavy panel of concrete that swung out to reveal a passageway big enough for the two of them to fit through. Liara was still dazed. Vance grabbed her by the collar and shoved her through the opening before following Liara through. On her way out, she grabbed a handful of ration packs and shoved them into her pocket. The drilling stopped as she pulled the hatch shut and spun the locking bar closed. Vance tore open the ration pack and thrust it at Liara, then she held her breath and covered her ears as the whole island seemed to shake, and concrete dust rained down on them from above, but the door held.

"On your feet, Liara," she said. Her former captor staggered, but stood. Where they were, there was hardly room to be fully upright. They were in the interior of some sort of geothermal exchange's spillway. A torrent of scalding water ran through a deep channel just to their right, while the two of them stood on a narrow platform that ran alongside the water, all the way to where the channel bent to the left. The water stank of sulfur. There were yellow stains everywhere, on the concrete, on the ceiling of the cavern, on the metal railings.

They progressed as best they could, Liara staggering and holding her side as thought she had a cramp, while she stuffed another ration bar into her mouth. The path rounded a bend, and the spillway widened, and again, at another turn. The island shook again.

"Sounds like they found our way out," Liara said. She was putting a brave face on things, but her skin gray and scaly in a way it hadn't before she'd used her biotics.

"How is it you can even use your biotics?" Vance asked, after they'd gone another kilometer, and made it around another turn in the cavern. "When we took you captive, we made sure to pull your wetware."

Liara smiled. "You only took the external amp," she said. "There's a second, surgically implanted at the base of my spine."

"Those are illegal," Vance said.

"I work in intelligence," Liara said. "Just about everything I do is illegal." Vance smiled, but Liara's look was dead serious. "If you'd left me with both amps," she said, "I'd have torn a hole in your ship and there'd have been nothing you or the rest of the Alliance could have done to stop me." Vance didn't doubt her. They went on in silence, Liara's limp was getting better, but it was still slowing her down. The cavern they had entered was broad, nearly a thousand meters across, and the raging torrent of water had slowed as it had grown deeper and wider. Still it was moving quickly, a seemingly still sheet, its surface rough and pitted with intermingling eddies and currents that filled the air with a low hum.

But over the sound of the water, the sound of voices and footsteps carried on the wind.

"Do you hear them?" Vance said.

Liara nodded. "There's no cover here," she said, "Up ahead I see an opening. Looks like as good a place as any to make a stand." Vance nodded in agreement, but they had to make it there first.

They ran, Liara half-limping as she went, toward the opening. It was a tall arch, cut into the wall of the cavern, and behind it there looked like there might be something they could use as cover. As they drew closer, half running, half limping, they saw something else. Beyond the archway, the open area was a landing pad, and sitting in the middle of it was a ship, a newer model private transport, fast and inconspicuous, even if it was likely unarmed. The ship's name, painted in bold red and gold lettering across the bow, read _Ancon II_.

"Well," Liara said with a smile. "Our luck seems to be turning, doesn't it?" She flipped a power coupling on the ground console. The ship's running and cockpit lights came on, and the ramp slowly dropped down for them to enter. Liara hurried inside. Vance followed, and watched from the entrance to the cockpit while Liara was warming up the reactor. After a moment, Liara asked, "Do you still have that pistol?" Liara asked, without turning around. Vance did. "It seems we're unarmed, so I'm going to need you to guard the ramp."

"Right," Vance said. She hurried back out to the ramp, into the main cabin, where one of them had stained one of the white leather seats with a bloody handprint. The ramp was slung under the bow of the ship, so Vance had good cover from the ship itself, and from the nose gear that also blocked part of her view of the entrance. She took up position at the base of the ramp, right behind where the landing gear was thickest, and waited. Over the comms, Liara said, _Three minutes_. Enough time, Vance realized, for anything to happen. She might as well have said forever. She waited. The footsteps drew near and then seemed to stop. _Two minutes_ , Liara told her. Still enough time for the world to fall apart. A head popped out beyond the side of the arch, and Vance fired twice. The head disappeared. Just on the other side of the opening, a deep voice was shouting orders. A group ran across the opening, and she shot at them—too late—as they took up positions on the other side. _One minute,_ Liara said. _Get ready_.

Seconds passed, as Vance waited. Maybe the troops had paused for a heavy weapon to be brought up. A single rocket would more than ruin any hopes of getting away. Or perhaps they were wary of her. Never doubt the determination of the desperate.

Anyone who fights for a living knows one thing to be true. To attack is to be vulnerable. Sharks roll their eyes back in their head, cats toy with their prey, advancing troops may suddenly stop and start digging in, refusing to advance any further, and all for the same reason. Because what you hurt can hurt you back. Even a mouse has teeth and claws. And so there is the fear that make the finger hesitate on the trigger, that delays the charge for a moment too long. It has always been this way, the dreadful balance between attack and counterattack, since the first blow was struck.

But then something landed on the ground twenty meters away, and they were coming. The world stood still for a moment, and Vance's ears rang with silence. Six men were charging at her, while their comrades fired from cover behind the wall. She shot wildly at the afterimage of one of her attackers, and the man behind her target fell, his chest a giant wound. She fired again and again, and that sent them scrambling in all directions. She kept firing until her weapon overheated.

Liara was screaming for her to come on board, and so she ran, dropping the pistol as she went. The ramp was nearly a meter above the ground when she reached it, but she barely stopped to climb on, bounding upward, still running as the ramp lifted her to safety. The ship was already aloft, and lurching to one side, and Vance paused to look down at the landing pad, where two of the attackers had been killed by the downblast from the ship's maneuvering jets, and that made her happy but the ramp was still closing and then there she was on her knees, and Liara was telling her to hold on to something, and the ship seemed fall into a dark hole in the center of the world, while gravity, and some other incomprehensible force pinned her to the floor and all she could see was a mix of warring dark and light, until the darkness finally won, and overwhelmed the universe.


End file.
